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So I bought this clapped out contraption on eBay that resembles a computer. It's comically bad. But it works, had a Sky Lake CPU, an RX 470 4GB (which is better than my 7950), power supply, a single stick of RAM, etc. Anyways, the OS is on a 320 GB 2.5 drive. There's an NVMe slot on it so I'm going to buy a cheap SSD and move it over. I have two questions:
1) Recommendation on a cheap 256 or 512 GB SSD? I don't want QLC, I know that. This will be a Plex server but not much on the host OS disk will be going on.
2) What's the recommended way of migrating the OS? Typically I'd just load up a Linux USB and DD everything over, resizing before/after with GParted if needed. That's slow and probably not the "right" way of doing it.

If you live near a Microcenter, I bought one of their pseudo house-brand Inland Premium 512GB M.2 drives for my dad, and it's a solid performer for the price. Uses the full Phison E12 controller, Toshiba 64-layer TLC, and has onboard DRAM.

If you don't live near a Microcenter, there seem to be other brands making nearly identical units. They're probably all coming from the same factory, but it's somewhat of a crapshoot on whether one of the others will have quietly cut corners somewhere. The one downside to buying the "Inland" brand from Microcenter is that the company doesn't seem to have a working updated website where you can download firmware, etc. Note that you could probably download firmware directly from Phison, and it should work (make sure you're fully backed up and the drive is under warranty).

In a Windows environment, the free trial version of Macrium Reflect does a great job at cloning and re-sizing boot drives.

Don’t pay extra for pcie over sata. You’ll never see an ROI.

Just to confirm, "2.5 inch drive" as in the squished mechanical drives that used to be popular in laptops?

USB stick + dd and gparted is probably what I'd do also. There shouldn't be any special rules about migrating on to an M.2 drive. Older boards can have problems booting from a PCIe SSD, but if the machine has a skylake CPU, then chances are pretty good you can drop it right in and treat it like any other SSD.

I've used SSDs from Crucial in my last few builds. The MX300 or MX500 are relatively cheap, and you're not likely to notice the performance delta between it and one of the faster SSDs unless you really hammer the drive.

Redocbew wrote:

Just to confirm, "2.5 inch drive" as in the squished mechanical drives that used to be popular in laptops?

... Yes. And it's mounted sideways in 2x2.5 bays. It's painfully slow.

Also, I may just give up. The Windows is not activated.

Yeah that needs to go. An SSD would do that machine a world of good.

DragonDaddyBear wrote:

Also, I may just give up. The Windows is not activated.

Is there a reason you need to use Windows?

It's already on the box? Storage space with tiered storage is easier? Reuse? Really, no. I'm just lazy and out of practice with Linux. Plex would probably run better on Ubuntu anyways.