My journey with this IBuyPower computer continues.
I have to admit I am VERY happy with this computer. I’ve had it for 8 years and she’s still cooking along. I wrote about my trouble with the graphics card which worked out great. It improved the performance greatly and I am happy with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. Because I use it to encode videos, the performance boost from the now dead GTX 1070.
I was still struggling with some performance issues. Especially with Premiere Pro when it was doing its thing. Simple tasks like creating peak files, adjusting color and even sound modifications seemed to take a while. I saw in the task manager that it was the hard drive that was peaked and struggling.
ALSO, my main drive which has the operating system is a lil ole Apacer AS340 240GB (SSD) and was maxing out several times a week. What I mean is I would get warnings that my drive was too full. Since I had all of the Adobe applications on that drive (for performance), it was too full and I had to clean the drive a few times a month.
Since drive C is so small, I used a 1TB HDD to hold all my files. All footage and file encoding was done on this drive because of the size of the files. It worked well but this was what was cause everything to slow down so bad. I could see that drive D was 100% any time I tried to most anything. Even encoding was exceptionally slow due to the use of an HDD.
Lo and behold, I have an M.2 slot on my motherboard! That means I can install an affordable SSD (no moving parts) drive!! Glory be!
As has become my new SOP (standard operating procedure), I turned to Chabeety (ChatGPT) for technical advice and counsel. I asked for the best for the motherboard for performance and the WD_BLACK 2TB SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive was recommended. I got the 2TB due to price but they go up to 8TB ($579). I did not get the heatsink because I won’t be gaming.
Now for the important part. Thanks to consulting with Chabeety, I was made aware that my particular mother board (MSI Z370-A PRO) has a little quirk that prevents the SATA1 port from working if there is a drive in the M.2 port. Huh? I double checked the manual and sure enough, it’s true.
Had I not asked Chabeety about this, I would have plugged in my new 2TB SSD and the computer would NOT have booted at all. Why? Because SATA1 is connected to drive C and as mentioned, that is the OS disk. I would have been removing that very difficult to install, SSD just to figure it all out. Thank goodness I had my technological mise en place.
So, with the M.2 SSD on the way (same day, thank you Amazon Prime), I thought I would prepare my computer for the install. Turn to Chabeety again, I asked if changing the port for drive C to port 2 would affect anything, to which it replied, no. Everything should boot up and operate normally.
So, I moved what was plugged into SATA2 (D drive) to SATA3 and SATA1 (C drive) to SATA2, turned it on and it came to life perfectly. No problemo!
With the hardware prepped, I turned to software. Adobe Creative Suite, I have the whole Kit and Kaboodle. You can’t just move the apps, you have to uninstall them and then reinstall them in the new location. To do that, you have to do it in the Creative Cloud Desktop app.
What we are doing is changing the location the new apps will be installed. I chose to do that after I uninstalled everything just to make sure paths didn’t get screwed up. So I removed the apps and waited for my new hard drive to arrive. I literally brought up the live map in Amazon tracking and watched the truck enroute. (What’s funny is I get 3 or more deliveries a day, but never tracked one like this one.)
It came but I opted to wait for morning so I had a clear head.
I didn’t get any pictures of the installation process but what I did was disconnect my external drives (2 8TB drives), reboot without those drives. Then shut it down and removed the power cord. I removed the graphics card so I could fit may fat ham hands in there. Then, after the 5th or 6th attempted, I got that silly little screw in there. I reconnected everything and clicked the on button.
Probably one of the longest restarts of all time. Not really, just felt that way.
Booted up, no problem!! YEA!!!
I consulted with Chabeety about allocating the drive and learned a new shortcut. Win+x brings up a handy menu with a link to the “disk manager” and Chabeety walked me through it. Now I have a drive G that is 1.8TB WOWZA
Now that the drive is installed and allocated, I zoom back to the Creative Cloud Desktop app to change the path for installation of the Creative Suite!
So a little more advice…….
Open each app and change the media settings so that all scratch disks and caches are on the new drive too. Moving the media files from HDD “D” to SSD “G” was arduous to say the least but now application files, caches and media files share one speedy SSD!!
In all, it took the better part of a day to get this done but it was worth every minute, and every penny. I’ve made a few videos and I can tell a huge difference.
I linked to some products, they are affiliate links which means I’ll get a little commission should you order. Thank you!