[New PC Build] Confusion with SSD's

AlBQuirky · August 2020

I'm slowly building a new PC. I'm hoping to use a 500GB SSD for Windows (7x64) and another 2TB SSD for my games. I'll have normal HDDs for the usual storage, otherwise.

Specs:

Motherboard/CPU: MSI X570 Gaming Plus with AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6 Core, 12 Thread CPU

SSD 1: Samsung EVO 860 500GB

SSD 2: Samsung EVO 860 2TB

Now, when I was reading through my motherboard manual, it talked about m.1 and m.2 cables and sockets for SSDs. Do I need to worry about this to get my PC to boot up from an SSD? Or will I be able to just "plug and play" to load on Windows?

I searched a bit on "the net" and found that it may not be as cut and dried to do what I'm hoping to do. Some people were talking about mirroring(?) a Windows disc onto the SSD, like using a "normal disc" to load Windows then copying it over onto the SSD.

Thanks for any help.

Sign me,

Confused

Vrika · August 2020

Windows 7 is an old operating system and it does not support your new hardware.

Normally you don't need to worry about SATA/NVME/M.2 because they all work just "plug and play". However that is with operating systems that do support the hardware. With Windows 7 stuff may work or not, and you may need to use some workarounds to get it work, because it's not really intended to support that new hardware.

BrotherMaynard · August 2020

Vrika said:

Windows 7 is an old operating system and it does not support your new hardware.

Normally you don't need to worry about SATA/NVME/M.2 because they all work just "plug and play". However that is with operating systems that do support the hardware. With Windows 7 stuff may work or not, and you may need to use some workarounds to get it work, because it's not really intended to support that new hardware.

If it's a question of the drives, they will be working perfectly fine with Windows 7. AFAIK, only the CPU, some new MB features and USB are affected by the move to Windows 10 (and even there it's a completely arbitrary decision to stop the support - nothing to do with the system itself).

Since the question was about booting up Win7 from SSDs and the models mentioned by the OP were Samsung EVO 860, then the answer is simply there will be no problems with these drives.

I'm running a 6-year old PC with 2 x Samsung EVO 840 1 TB in RAID 0 under Windows 7 and there are zero problems. That includes installing and re-installing Win7 over the past six years.

They are SATA drives, the SATA standard is supported by WIn7 without any issue, so if this is the OP's choice, it's safe to go for it. I would personally not choose Samsung drives (or anything Samsung-made, for that matter), but there's no question about the drives working under Win7 - they will.

Vrika · August 2020

BrotherMaynard said:

Vrika said:

Windows 7 is an old operating system and it does not support your new hardware.

Normally you don't need to worry about SATA/NVME/M.2 because they all work just "plug and play". However that is with operating systems that do support the hardware. With Windows 7 stuff may work or not, and you may need to use some workarounds to get it work, because it's not really intended to support that new hardware.

If it's a question of the drives, they will be working perfectly fine with Windows 7. AFAIK, only the CPU, some new MB features and USB are affected by the move to Windows 10 (and even there it's a completely arbitrary decision to stop the support - nothing to do with the system itself).

Since the question was about booting up Win7 from SSDs and the models mentioned by the OP were Samsung EVO 860, then the answer is simply there will be no problems with these drives.

Afaik most likely scenario is that the drives will work but neither keyboard nor mouse will unless you install an unofficial workaround.

I haven't ever installed Win 7 on X570 motherboard. I doubt we can find anyone who's done it on these forums?

Gdemami · August 2020

AlBQuirky said:

I'm slowly building a new PC. I'm hoping to use a 500GB SSD for Windows (7x64) and another 2TB SSD for my games. I'll have normal HDDs for the usual storage, otherwise.

Specs:
Motherboard/CPU: MSI X570 Gaming Plus with AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6 Core, 12 Thread CPU
SSD 1: Samsung EVO 860 500GB
SSD 2: Samsung EVO 860 2TB

Now, when I was reading through my motherboard manual, it talked about m.1 and m.2 cables and sockets for SSDs. Do I need to worry about this to get my PC to boot up from an SSD? Or will I be able to just "plug and play" to load on Windows?

I searched a bit on "the net" and found that it may not be as cut and dried to do what I'm hoping to do. Some people were talking about mirroring(?) a Windows disc onto the SSD, like using a "normal disc" to load Windows then copying it over onto the SSD.

Thanks for any help.

Sign me,
Confused

Your drive description is insufficient.

EVO 860 drives are using SATA interface and come in 2 usual form factors - 2.5'(notebook-size) or M.2. 2.5' uses traditional SATA cables to connect the drive to your motherboard while M.2 drives are connected directly into your motherboard.

Your motherboard supports 2x M.2 slots so you should have no issue connecting both drives even if they are both M.2.

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/ssd-860-evo-2-5--sata-iii-1tb-mz-76e1t0b-am/#benefits

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/ssd-860-evo-m-2-sata-250gb-mz-n6e250bw/#benefits

Vrika · August 2020

Gdemami said:

Vrika said:

BrotherMaynard said:

Vrika said:

Windows 7 is an old operating system and it does not support your new hardware.

Normally you don't need to worry about SATA/NVME/M.2 because they all work just "plug and play". However that is with operating systems that do support the hardware. With Windows 7 stuff may work or not, and you may need to use some workarounds to get it work, because it's not really intended to support that new hardware.

If it's a question of the drives, they will be working perfectly fine with Windows 7. AFAIK, only the CPU, some new MB features and USB are affected by the move to Windows 10 (and even there it's a completely arbitrary decision to stop the support - nothing to do with the system itself).

Since the question was about booting up Win7 from SSDs and the models mentioned by the OP were Samsung EVO 860, then the answer is simply there will be no problems with these drives.

Afaik most likely scenario is that the drives will work but neither keyboard nor mouse will unless you install an unofficial workaround.

I haven't ever installed Win 7 on X570 motherboard. I doubt we can find anyone who's done it on these forums?
LOL

It's hard to discuss with you since you only spam that LOL -button, but:

Some newer hardware used to have situations where only USB 2 ports were working on Windows 7. With X570 chipsets that's not the case any more, you'll get into situation where no UBS ports work without workaround.

Which means that neither keyboard nor mouse would work without a workaround.

Quizzical · August 2020

If you're building a new computer, I'd advise against using Windows 7 unless there's some dire reason why Windows 10 absolutely won't work. It's already off support, so new security holes likely won't get fixed. That gets you all of the security problems of people who refuse to update vulnerable software, and it's only going to get worse as time passes.

Cleffy · August 2020

On a new PC, I would go one large nVME drive and that's it. With the bandwidth coming off an nVME drive, the benefits of splitting it across 2 drives is moot. If data security is important to you, then I would get a traditional HDD that strictly holds backups. Personally, I just use a cloud service to hold all my documents, photos, and the like.

I also don't know why people hold off on moving to newer versions of Windows. There is a need at the enterprise level due to legacy support, but the consumer I really don't understand it. I went from Windows 95 to 98 to XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 10. In my view there was no need to hold onto any of those OSes as the next OS version was better. For instance Vista had 64-bit support with 32-bit backwards compatibility.
Just make sure when you install the OS you are booting through UEFI so it creates the correct boot drive.
You can create your own Windows 10 Installation Media from Microsoft here.

AlBQuirky · August 2020

Quizzical said:

If you're building a new computer, I'd advise against using Windows 7 unless there's some dire reason why Windows 10 absolutely won't work. It's already off support, so new security holes likely won't get fixed. That gets you all of the security problems of people who refuse to update vulnerable software, and it's only going to get worse as time passes.

Personal preference?

I dislike how Windows treat my desktop PC like a mobile phone. I don't want gadget interconnectivity. Windows 7x64 does exactly what I want with programs I enjoy using.

This "opinion" may hamstring me, but I am nowhere near being a "bleeding edge" user

PS: For an OS that is no longer supported, I certainly get "updates" about every other day, if not each day.

Ridelynn · August 2020

AlBQuirky said:

Quizzical said:

If you're building a new computer, I'd advise against using Windows 7 unless there's some dire reason why Windows 10 absolutely won't work. It's already off support, so new security holes likely won't get fixed. That gets you all of the security problems of people who refuse to update vulnerable software, and it's only going to get worse as time passes.

Personal preference?

I dislike how Windows treat my desktop PC like a mobile phone. I don't want gadget interconnectivity. Windows 7x64 does exactly what I want with programs I enjoy using.

This "opinion" may hamstring me, but I am nowhere near being a "bleeding edge" user

PS: For an OS that is no longer supported, I certainly get "updates" about every other day, if not each day.

Well, I'm glad it runs all the software you want.

Doesn't look like it's going to run all the hardware you want though. Last I heard, Win7 will certainly support SATA no problem, but has issues with nVME driver availability. You may get lucky and the motherboard your buying might have it, then again, it might only support drive access and not booting, or may not support the drive at all.

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/MPG-X570-GAMING-PLUS#down-driver

Officially, MSI only supports Win10x64 for the x570 motherboard lineup. You may be able to find drivers elsewhere, or hack something together to work, or get lucky and it mostly works out of the box. But yeah... good luck.

Windows 10 is no where near bleeding edge either. It's been out for more than five years now. I get that Win7 does what you want, I liked it too... but that means you get stuck with your old hardware too. Something about cake and eating it too.

https://www.ubackup.com/windows-7/install-windows-7-to-nvme-4348.html

When you have proper driver support, then the OS will boot off either SATA or nVME no problem, it's as easy as selecting the appropriate drive as the boot volume during setup. When you don't have proper driver support is where it gets interesting, maybe still possible but with a lot of effort and work arounds, or maybe not possible at all.

Asm0deus · August 2020

Vrika said:

BrotherMaynard said:

Vrika said:

Windows 7 is an old operating system and it does not support your new hardware.

Normally you don't need to worry about SATA/NVME/M.2 because they all work just "plug and play". However that is with operating systems that do support the hardware. With Windows 7 stuff may work or not, and you may need to use some workarounds to get it work, because it's not really intended to support that new hardware.

If it's a question of the drives, they will be working perfectly fine with Windows 7. AFAIK, only the CPU, some new MB features and USB are affected by the move to Windows 10 (and even there it's a completely arbitrary decision to stop the support - nothing to do with the system itself).

Since the question was about booting up Win7 from SSDs and the models mentioned by the OP were Samsung EVO 860, then the answer is simply there will be no problems with these drives.

Afaik most likely scenario is that the drives will work but neither keyboard nor mouse will unless you install an unofficial workaround.

I haven't ever installed Win 7 on X570 motherboard. I doubt we can find anyone who's done it on these forums?

You just need to install some usb 3.0 drivers kind of like you can with b450 boards.

I have a ryzen 3600x on a b450 tomahawk max running just fine and dandy with w7x64. My m.2 nvme ssd works just fine too.

HOWEVER

For a b450/b470 boards or lower you need to get the usb 3.0 drivers from the board support page from mobo makers website and slipstream that into your w7 iso and make a usb stick installer.

You also need to use something like wuacpufix (MS tried to artificially block w7 from getting updates if you have newer cpu's) if you want to enable security updates OR you can use simplix updatepacks to get the security updates to w7.

For x570 it pretty much the same thing except you need to use some tweaked beta drivers. These drivers are from AMD but have been tweaked by canonkong for w7/vista.

Yes they are safe and stable.

Tools I like to use:

windows ultimate iso X17-59465 (from this you can install any version)

drivers from the mobo support page or the canonkong x570 drivers

integrate7 program to slipstream everything into a w7 ISO to make a usb installer (the newer version of this have various usb3.0/3.1 and nvme drivers included in it already for various boards)

simplix updatepacks

wuacpufix

dazloader (shh just google it)

rufus for preparing your usb stick that will be your installs stick

Now it used to be you had to enable csm/legacy mode in the bios to install w7 but now you can do so via uefi though I haven't experimented with that yet.

I got to be honest though and say if you have to ask if there will be issues putting windows 7 on a sata ssd this may be a little too complicated for you.

All this above is basically just the user needing to tweak or modify their windows installer, be it usb stick or via dvd, and slipstream in some drivers microsoft had but left out on purpose from windows 7 to try and force people onto w10.

It's basically the same process as when you add in (slipstream) updates right into your windows installation to make a up to date windows installer.

For the x570 boards you would want to use the "USB 3/XHCI driver stack for windows 7/vista" just google it.

It's a truly generic USB 3/XHCI host driver, even supporting USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) devices.

Supports USB 3/XHCI host controllers from any manufacturer (USB 3.0/3.1/3.2).

Supports 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) systems.

Basically windows 8 drivers can be ported over to w7 and older OS.

Gdemami · August 2020

AlBQuirky said:
This "opinion" may hamstring me, but I am nowhere near being a "bleeding edge" user

...that speaks more for getting a new OS rather than holding off and keeping the old one.

As an average users, it will feel merely the same.

You seem to think of Win10 at release but they walked long path since.

It's like $3 for a legal copy, it won't hurt to try.

Asm0deus · August 2020

@OP ; I do not like the direction windows 10 has gone either however depending on what you want to do you may have no choice to upgrade...some games are dx12 only and will require w10.

I will be build a x570 PC this coming black friday made for VR first and as such I will be using w10.

My point to this mini rant is that if your objection to w10 is the stupid mobile phone/tile look (which I dislike myself too) and you don't care about the telemetry you can always I believe easily modify w10 to look and act more like windows 7.

If you do try windows dare I suggest you get windows 10 pro as MS like taking away options from the regular w10 and making it pro only.

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-make-windows-10-feel-more-like-windows-7

Tiller · August 2020

I remember the time here when people refused to use Windows 7 and were still using Windows 2000. Now they seem to refuse Windows 10 and are sticking with 7. I guess they will all move to Windows 10 when the rest of us are using Windows 20.

slowz2secret · August 2020

Try to get a PCIe SSD from samsung, they are the faster ssd.

skeaser · August 2020

With very minimal effort my WIn10 experience is hardly different from Win7. The only thing that really can't be gotten rid of is the whole "settings + control panel" fragmentation which is annoying but not deal breaking.

M$ did a pretty good job off adding straightforward toggle switches for almost all the extra "features" they added.

Asm0deus · August 2020

Tiller said:

I remember the time here when people refused to use Windows 7 and were still using Windows 2000. Now they seem to refuse Windows 10 and are sticking with 7. I guess they will all move to Windows 10 when the rest of us are using Windows 20.

It's not as easy as all that really though, not everyone that dislikes or doesn't really wants to use a new OS like w10 is just being an old fart afraid of change like you seem to be making it sound like.

I had no problems going from dos to windows to new windows versions but windows 10 has gone a direction I feel is far, far different than all the previous version.

I do not like Apple and if you ever wondered what a MS windows version developed by Apple would look like well now with w10 you have your answer and that's not a direction I like or really want to encourage.

I am not afraid of change and upgrades but I feel MS have kind of betrayed their vision or mission statements when it comes to the individual users and have made it more about themselves and other big organizations.

There's just too much bloat and junk in w10 that has zero to do with, "to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more."

Windows 1O could be so much more if they got rid of some of the forced crap.

Btw there will be no windows 20, unless they go back on their new vision, as they wish to make windows more like a service that you need to continually update.

Quizzical · August 2020

Tiller said:

I remember the time here when people refused to use Windows 7 and were still using Windows 2000. Now they seem to refuse Windows 10 and are sticking with 7. I guess they will all move to Windows 10 when the rest of us are using Windows 20.

Windows 7 was pretty popular at launch. It was Vista and 8 that were really unpopular. And I don't recall any gamers sticking to Windows 2000 longer than necessary, as that wasn't even targeted at the general public. A lot of people stuck to XP for quite some time, but people were generally glad to be rid of the older, unstable versions of Windows. Getting rid of your blue screen per day to have XP actually be stable was a big deal.

Quizzical · August 2020

slowz2secret said:

Try to get a PCIe SSD from samsung, they are the faster ssd.

Right now, the fastest SSDs available generally use a Phison controller, as they were the first out with a PCI Express 4.0 controller. But there are other competitors coming soon, likely from all of the major SSD controller vendors.

AlBQuirky · September 2020

Sharne said:

As others have stated though, Windows 10 has come a long way from its original state at release.

Just watched the nVidia stream and am seriously rethinking my OS choice

Even if I upgrade to Windows 10, it will be an upgrade, so I have to put Windows 7 on first.

AlBQuirky · November 2020

Update:

My old PC went kaput (motherboard issues) last week. I was forced to try and put my new one together. I tried Windows 7X64. Apparently, the SSD was OK, but my Ryzen CPU was not good for USB, so my keyboard and mouse failed to work.

So I broke down and bought Windows 10. Not an upgrade, a brand new product. That went smooth as silk.

Thanks all for the suggestions and help

Mendel · November 2020

AlBQuirky said:

Update:

My old PC went kaput (motherboard issues) last week. I was forced to try and put my new one together. I tried Windows 7X64. Apparently, the SSD was OK, but my Ryzen CPU was not good for USB, so my keyboard and mouse failed to work.

So I broke down and bought Windows 10. Not an upgrade, a brand new product. That went smooth as silk.

Thanks all for the suggestions and help

You might want to watch MS, @AlBQuirky. They wanted to put an annual recurring charge on my card for Win10.

Wizardry · November 2020

Windows 10 is FREE,don't worry about W7 if your worried about cost.
W10 is a scummy move by Microsoft and their stinking Edge browser loading up everytime and greeting you with an advert.

If I had my choice iId stop at 9 but no longer an option now ,Microsoft made sure of that as well.
M2 SSD socket faster more expensive if that was your original question.

Just go to Linus tech Tips LTT check forums or his MANY videos for any answers you may seek. https://linustechtips.com/

AlBQuirky · November 2020

Mendel said:

AlBQuirky said:

Update:

My old PC went kaput (motherboard issues) last week. I was forced to try and put my new one together. I tried Windows 7X64. Apparently, the SSD was OK, but my Ryzen CPU was not good for USB, so my keyboard and mouse failed to work.

So I broke down and bought Windows 10. Not an upgrade, a brand new product. That went smooth as silk.

Thanks all for the suggestions and help

You might want to watch MS, @AlBQuirky. They wanted to put an annual recurring charge on my card for Win10.

Please tell me you're joking...

I'm no fan of MS, but my hatred of Apple runs deep.

Do I need to learn Linux? lol

Quizzical · November 2020

AlBQuirky said:

Do I need to learn Linux? lol

Torval says yes.

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