So far, so good: The 11 Pro Machine is a refurb and was operational when I received it: At this point, all I've really done is rename it and plug in the DATA drive (480 GB SSD, Drive "F:" now) that I pulled out of the Win 10 Pro machine. Disk Management reports that "F:" is 71% free, so that gives an idea of my internal data storage requirements - they are pretty modest by modern standards, as most of my image and archival files go on an external drive (which gets an upgrade to a USB-C connection). My video file storage is very minimal, and those also go to the external drive. "F:" appears to be fully functional, no data was lost, and it is working great. :-)
I am now at the point of needing to initialize the 3rd internal SSD. The machine successfully sees it as "Disk 1", Basic, 447.12 GB, Unallocated (and online). The next step is to create / allocate a "New Simple Volume". The question is, how big should it be? Most advice seems to lean toward leaving about 10% of the SSD unallocated, but, it appears ~33 GB is already reserved for the thing to manage itself. If I only end up with, oh, 410 GB of actually available room for my files, in the "New Simple Volume", I suppose that would be fine. But, does that figure make the most sense?
FWIW, the "biggest" programs, besides the OS, that I use @ present are Libre Office, Brave Browser, and (rarely) Google (Chrome Browser) and Word 2000. There's a slight chance I might eventually add some sort of CAD program, but it would be something "lesser" than full blown AutoCad, which I cannot possibly afford.
No need to waste Jim Rob's bandwidth on dissing Windows, BTW, there are already probably gigabytes of such comments on FR's servers!
Again, to All, thanks, and maybe the discussion will help someone else, too. :-)
Oh, if anyone wonders, use of titles including German or Norse names for the day posted helps me find the articles later, if I’m on a machine lacking the bookmark. :-)
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You have me trying to decipher this and visualize your drive flow chart... And I’m having trouble... lol
“BTW, there are already probably gigabytes of such comments on FR’s servers!”
That would be millions of comments. Text takes up very little space.
Don’t use an SSD for backup. SSDs fail instantly with no prospect of data recovery. You can use an SSD as your primary drive for speed, but make sure your backups are automated and going to an array of actual platters.
Most people are not even aware of the practice of leaving unallocated space on their NVMEs or other types of SSDs. If your “data drive” has 71% free after years of usage this practice would have been unlikely to have made any difference at all. And depending on the design and how recent its design is the practice may or may not make any difference in your long-term performance or the longevity of your drive. But go ahead and leave whatever portion of your apparently new drive unallocated if it makes you feel better... this will not hurt anything.
You might want to install the free version of CrystalDiskInfo available on the Microsoft store on your computer and check the health of your drives. Look at Wear Leveling Count, Percentage Used, and Total Host Writes.
If the wear percentage is under ~80%, your drive is still in great shape.
I am curious which recent Windows 10 update that you believe caused your difficulty. It is possible that something else may have been responsible... Your primary drive on that machine or other hardware may have just failed for any number of reasons... data corruption, malware, mechanical or physical damage from a voltage spike or who knows what else. A windows update gone bad can trigger other issues that were ticking away in the background.
I try to keep a fairly recent image of my primary drive on an external, network or secondary drive available in case of the type of disaster you have described. I always have a couple USB drives close by with Hiren’s Boot CD installed. These are used to get into the computer when it will not boot from the primary drive.
Hiren’s Boot CD (basically no one uses it on a CD anymore) has got a bunch of utilities that can be used to restore an appropriate image back to your primary drive when something goes wrong and also utilities to save recent data residing on your drive before you do this. I use the free version of Macrium Reflect that is on Hiren’s Boot CD for most of my image creation and restore needs. It allows you to do regular incremental backups to whatever media that you want to.
I have a mini-PC running OpenMediaVault (which is free) hooked to an inexpensive RAID enclosure which provides network storage where I save backups of all my disk images. It is not complicated But I am sure that this would be overkill for you. I have a bunch of computers hooked to my home network and am constantly experimenting with various operating systems in both multi-boot configurations and in virtual machines. Most of my failures are caused by me and not the hardware, software or the OS that I am using. There is always something else that I want to try out... mostly because I enjoy technical challenges even in my advancing years.
Sorry for all the typos in my post... you are welcome to use freepmail if you would like more specific information or clarification. I will be out part of the day, but I will try to get back to you promptly if I see a message.
IMHO, the height of Internet forum rudeness is to reply to a post only to tell the OP they’ve asked the wrong question, but that’s what I’m about to do. Sort of.
If you were happy with Win10, re-install with Windows 10 Ameliorated (images available free on the Wayback Machine). I’ve been running Win10AME for more than that long but this is the image I used to reinstall five years ago:
https://archive.org/details/windows-ame-2004
Win10AME has had the most offensive bits of Win10Pro removed, to include Cortana, all the bloatware, and the automated updates function. MS CANNOT forcibly update your PC because the entire updates circuit has been removed. If you want to apply updates, you either have to do them individually or use a 3rd party app like WSUS Offline (freeware).
I have found User Access Control (UAC) to be horribly offensive ever since it first reared its ugly head in Win7, And Win10AME will allow you to completely disable it.
Win10AME does have its hitches, like the administrator’s account is disabled by default, but I can coach you through fixing that. And enabling auto-login at boot.