I recently upgraded a part of my gaming PC where a disk drive was running out of space. The Windows drive had pretty much become full with only a few tens of GB free. I was also worried as some apps keep NEEDING to be on the c: drive for some reason.
For these reasons I bought a 2TB SSD and installed it into my PC with a SATA link. This, I now know, was the wrong move but I migrated my c: data using the Samsung software and changed the boot order of the disks in the BIOS. This all seemed remarkably straight forward and didn’t actually take that long. I was happy.
Then, one day I happened to have a look at the physical set up of the drives in my PC and I realised there was a M.2 slot and the original c: drive was based on that. It showed up in the OS as a 250GB drive which was now empty. Given the improved speeds for read and write via a M.2 slot I decided I would upgrade the PC even more and move the OS to the direct motherboard contact.
I ordered and then installed a 2TB M.2 drive into the correct slot on the motherboard. Once I rebooted the PC I had a few screens of death and that was curious but checking the BIOS it all looked good. So eventually Windows started and I went about adding the Samsung 990 Pro to the drive list. Except, it wasn’t there! For some reason Windows couldn’t see the drive. I was frustrated.
I did some internet searching but a lot of the solutions pointed to AMD chipsets and I don’t have that. I tried re-booting and looking into the BIOS settings but I couldn’t see anything wrong. I used the Disk Management tool to see if it would see the drive but it refused. I genuinely didn’t know what to do until I found something that, I think, was called Storage Space. It was using the new drive! I have no idea what it does but I stopped the service and told it to stop using my new drive for this. Once that was done the M.2 SSD showed up in disk management.
It took around forty minutes for the data migration tool to transfer the contents of the c: drive to the new drive. Then I rebooted and told the Bios to boot from the 990 Pro. The computer seemed happy to do this and worked well! This was good news. I cleared the old SSD of the Windows files and now have a good deal of spare storage. I think I might move my gaming files to the older SSD as they are currently on a physical hard drive. I’ll think about it.