SSD Help

I am very new to SSD's. I have a Samsung SSD PM841 256GB that came with my laptop I won at Dellauction.com. I have a 280 GB external HD, connected by the way of a powered usb external case, SATA. I'm told that ya don't want to use your SSD to store all your info on, just your OS, because you can't defrag a SSD. Plus these SSD's I found out are really a pain in the ***. Okay, when I turn on the drive, there is no drive letter in 'My Computer' or anywhere. I went to Command Prompt, found it through SELECT DISK. No drive letter, or online, offline info at all. When I click on C: drive, go to properties, click on hardware, it's in there as only a GEN DISK, (generic disk). I don't know what to do now, I have never had this problem before, it's just this SSD stuff is very different that the 'old' machanical HD's. Hopefully someone can help me with this, then I can symlink all my other info from SSD to HHD. Thanks.

Thanks for the quick reply, yes windows say's the best drivers are downloaded, that is the 1st thing I checked, this is just so strange & new to me, I don't think my SSD is all that much better, I do save about 28 seconds of boot up time, but what's 28 secs, lol. I don't do any high power games, just stream videos, and watch TV, DVD's on my laptop, have 1GB of DL internet speed. This SSD came with this laptop when I bought it, thinking of selling it & going back to my 'old' SATA drive that I know how to set up & get it to work.

I'm told that ya don't want to use your SSD to store all your info on, just your OS, because you can't defrag a SSD.

Whoever told you that doesn't know their a$$ from a hole in the ground!

Defragging has absolutely nothing to do with this. If you have file fragments scattered all over a SSD, that is NOT a problem at all. Fragmentation does NOT take up more space like it does with a hard drive, and it does not take longer to read in the entire file like it does with a hard drive. In fact, a fragmented file on a SSD takes the exact same amount of time to read in as it does if not fragmented.

As noted above, the only reason you might not want to save some files on a SSD is because per GB, SSDs cost more. Therefore, users tend to buy smaller SSDs than they would a HD.

I say, if budget allows, dump your HDs. They are of an old, antiquated technology. SSDs are more reliable, not to mention consume less power and generate less heat, don't weigh as much and take up less space too.

And I say put your user created documents on your SSD.

Note I have a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD as my C drive. It contains W10 Pro, Office 2007 Pro (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook), all my other installed programs, and all my user created documents and email too. And I still have over 180GB of free disk space.

And note I have a 64 page, 21,000+ Microsoft Word document I use for canned texts and links in my "work" helping out on forums. I have a shortcut to this doc on my desktop. When I click on that shortcut, the document "pops" open because both Word and that doc are on the SSD. It is a HUGE document, but at only 370KB, not a huge file.

I also have a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD as my D drive. It stores backups of C drive, plus 3,727 songs in 443 folders from my 600+ CD collection. And I still have 89.9GB of free disk space there.

Because SSDs consume less energy and produce less heat (heat is a factor in air conditioned environments), and because SSDs can be expected to last longer (many are warrantied for 10 years!) when you spread the higher initial price over the life of the drive, it is almost a wash.

Apologies. No offense meant. Just trying to point out the absurdity of it all. I note that defragging is so unnecessary with SSDs that it is disabled by default in Windows whenever Windows detects a SSD.

I thank all the help I got from everyone, I have figured it out. I now have a F:/ drive, that is my external HD, I am in the process of moving over some of my files from my SSD to my F:/ drive, Thanks again all,