Its a magical moment when you are faced with the death of a hard drive, but today, I witnessed my gaming hdd die a gruesome death. Today, it failed to boot, losing 1TB of installed games on my PC.
So, why did my HDD die? That is the question, it was relatively new, less than a year old. Is it under warranty still? These questions are all about my mind. But I also have to understand, what cause of possibly caused this to happen, why would it stop working? The answer is, cables came loose inside. I know this without even opening the computer up.
I know you have to ask, why I know this, well, my girlfriend was cleaning up, and moved my computer, the printer, and a bunch of the stuff under my desk. And after she did this, my system stopped working properly. So now I have to open up the computer, figure out why the cables came lose, were they not secured enough? And why. On Wednesday, a new stick of ram shows up for me, so on Wednesday, I will open up my computer, and replace the RAM, and fix the HDD.
So why write about this? Well, this impacts my ability to stream properly, and the upgrade to my computer that is coming shortly will effect a lot about my streaming career. I actively work towards making a new life, new avenues of profit to support my family. I cannot be a soldier forever, sooner or later, it will claim my life, or injure me enough to take me out of working. I already have a plethora of military related injuries. So prep work has begun to secure a new life away from the life of a soldier. I run this blog, I am building another website as well, I develop quick scripts to handle elements of my streaming career. I stream games, run a youtube channel, and I am tech support for another streamer, helping him keep his rig and setup working properly.
So my computers ability to function is important. It helps me work on, and maintain all these avenues of future careers. If any of these takes off and earns me enough money to retire from soldier life, I will.
But back to my HDD situation, now I am faced with questions about how to proceed going forward. Even once I repair this HDD issue, I want to improve my overall computer health without having to upgrade the entire thing. So I have started looking at replacing my exisiting hard drives with Solid State drives.
Since windows is installed on a non-SSD, i.e. a regular hard drive, the OS loads slow. For me to upgrade that hard-drive to a SSD I need to re-install windows onto the new HDD. Which means I have to buy a non OEM version of windows 10. Since my current version will not transfer to another drive easily. I have already bought software that claims they can move the installation over, but they simply didn’t work. So now I have to look at these options. But they are all worth it to make my computer last another few years before a full upgrade is due.
The cost of upgrading my drives to SSD’s will be about 500 to replace the 3 HDD’s in my computer, and maintaining the same size. But SSD means faster load times, and that’ll make all my software work faster, which will help stream faster, etc. Ultimately this update will save me from having to upgrade my CPU.
But what About my GPU? I currently run a NVidia 1060 3gb graphics card. This card is getting old, so, my motherboard can handle up to a 2060… So here we go.
This is a very important change in my system, but this will be the most expensive upgrade, but will extend the life of my system by about 5 years for streaming purposes. This is however, a 600$ CDN graphics card. But when this upgrade happens, my system will receive the biggest boost it will get before a whole new computer will need to be purchased. However to my total money spent for upgrades will be just over 1000$ CDN, it will overall cost me 2000$ less than a full new PC would cost to give me everything I am focusing on going forward.
Ultimately, wish me luck over the next few months as I work towards upgrading my PC. That is what this is all about.
SimmyDizzle and Friends 