QUESTION :
This may be the dumbest question on this site, but…
I have Windows 10. When I put my computer together like 3 years ago, I was pretty sure I did it all right, but I never saw any evidence that my SSD was actually plugged in properly. I just sort of never bothered to check it out or look into it.
Fast forward, I have a bunch of stuff installed, startup is pretty slow, and it takes even longer to boot some of my games. I decided to finally get around to looking into this question.
The thing is, on “My Computer” I only see a C drive, which makes me think that my SSD isn’t recognized. But my device manager clearly shows a PNY900 120GB SSD and an ST1000DM010-2EDP102, which are the hard drives it should have.
Okay, great, but I want to make sure my game is installed on the SSD and not the HDD… I have googled and searched StackExchange, but I’m not finding an answer. I’ve tried opening file explorer, clicking on “my computer,” right clicking and sorting by “file system” but everything is still on the C drive.
I tried going into program files and seeing if I could find more info in the program file itself, but it still just says “C:”. I can’t find anything under “properties” that shines a light on the issue either.
I tried opening “disc management” and it says I need to initialize a disc before I can do anything, and the only disk showing is called “Disc 1” which is not too helpful and also suggests I only have one disc. On the disc management screen, it shows C: for one disc, which is 47% free, with file system NTFS, and then 3 discs called Disc O partition[1, 2, or 5] all of which are 100% free, but which total to less than a gb of data, suggesting none of them or all of them together do not map to my 120gb SDD.
That’s the top portion, which is a table. On the bottom portion, I have Disc0 again, which is divided as shown above, and has a blue bar and lots of in formation. Here I also see “Disc 1” which has 111.77GB, and does show as my SSD, but the whole thing is unallocated and has a black bar.
The properties show it was migrated, configured, and started.
I have no idea if I am using my SSD at all.
ANSWER :
Okay okay wait I think I got this! It is all unallocated. I guess for whatever reason, unlike my Seagate HDD, I have to format my PNY SSD before using it. I took a leap of faith and just formatted it through Disc Management and suddenly it’s got a blue bar, a new drive letter (E:), and it looks like I’m good to go!
Wow. I put this off so long because my tower is in a hard-to-access spot behind my desk and I never wanted to pull it out and check the plugs, plus I had no idea how else to do it– now I know that’s because I did it the right way, but it seemed like a challenging and frustrating task to find another way to hook it up when I thought it was done wrong.