hi i need some advice with installing windows 10 on my new rig with rufus you can select mbr or gpt uefi so the question is which one should i grab when formatting my usb stick i know with my old prehistoric system i could only use mbr so i'm a little bit confused which one to select is there any difference in performance between gpt or mbr

 

If your disk, especially the Windows booting one, will be on a disk bigger than 2TB, you must use GPT to partition and format it. In essence, GPT is used for disks over 2TB. There are a few other differences, like GPT can hold more than 4 primary partitions, and it stores its MBR in multiple places, so it's a bit safer when it comes to MBR corruption. I hope I was clear enough.

If you want to know more, here's a nice article about the differences between MBR and GPT.

For your Windows installation stick you should use UEFI and GPT, since W10 boots only in UEFI mode from GPT drives. But it also depends on the options in your BIOS. You have to enable UEFI boot in the BIOS. If your system is a bit older, it might be set to "legacy boot" or UEFI+Legacy boot [the safe option ;)].

It is not about performance at all. Performance depends primarily on your HD, SSD, or flash drive speed, and the file system on it.

 

Last edited: Nov 26, 2020

Just what @SineWave said. Remember to use "UEFI+Legacy" option in Rufus and will work on both GPT/MBR.
If you have or plan to have disks bigger than 2GB I'd use GPT in all them just to forget about it.

You can convert disks between GPT and MBR types but it's not a trivial operation.

 

ty for the info it is a 1tb m2 ssd

 

Yeah, but think in all the disks, not only the boot one. Not like you can't have different types, as I said just for peace of mind.
Considering your SSD is quite big I'd go for GPT. It's likely that you may get some internal/external 3 or 4GB disk some day.
Just my two cents, it's up to you ;)

 

Personally I use MBR because I use 1 tb main drives for my operating system and the programs, these drives are inexpensive to replace In the event of a crash or drive failure. I learned this lesson from past experiences where I had Important data on my drives and lost everything on them due to HD failure, corrupted Data or a virus. I now store everything that is important on 4 tb external drives, on which each of them contains a folder of every important program that I use, I now no longer worry about drive failures. I can be up and running from scratch on a new drive in about an hour almost totally unattended. This may sound excessive but you will never hear me complaining about crashes or data loss.

 

I do almost the same thing. Indeed, big internal drives can make your life miserable. I learned this the hard way
The smaller the system partition the better. You can still use software portable/symlink or just install in different partitions/disks.
This way system backups are fast both to make and to restore.

I even try to do the same with external ones with important data, but that depends on your framework and number of usb/esata ports available. Before USB3(3.1) fast backups were only possible with eSata, now is easier.

 

One can assemble a really cheap NAS from old parts and install OpenMediaVault NAS server, and use all the spare hard disks you might have with it. It's really practical, for keeping backups of samples, projects etc.. My NAS has an Intel i5-8400 core duo with a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4 motherboard and 4GB of RAM. It's an incredible NAS. I have some experience with commercial NAS-es like Synology and Qnap, and I'd choose OMV one because it boots faster, shutdowns faster, it's easy for maintenance [gosh those Synology and Qnap user interfaces look weird], and you can assemble it for really, really cheap.

Good luck with the installation of Windows 10! I hope it's LTSC? It's the only W10 I would trust.

 

That's what I'll do as soon as I can get cheap 10Gb PCIe to ethernet adapters. Well, it'll be an slave machine, not only for NAS (REAPER reamote )
I just replaced mobo/ram/cpu so I have my old Gigabyte-EP45/Intel Quad QX9650/8GB DDR2-1066 growing dust.

Since a long time now I've been using my spare disks in an external double HDD deck (with two eSATAs). It's fast as fuck but you need a lot of SATA ports in your motherboard, which now I don't have.

Edited: damn, what prices and requirements... I'd better look for an USB3.1 based solution

 

Last edited: Nov 28, 2020

I have a 1tb m2 and 3tb mechanical drive new
then I still have a 4tb and 1tb external in use
what should i do gpt the m2 or just mbr?

 

m2, the Windows 10 boot disk, must be GPT formatted. No matter the size.

 

ok roger that

 

Always legacy MBR, always BIOS-boot for me. One system on one partition, as simple as possible.

As I switch between ~15 different Installations that's by far the best way for me. It takes a few seconds longer to boot via BIOS but I can easily live with that.

 

?

Sure about that? M.2 is a form factor, M.2 could be S-ATA or NVMe. But I never read anything about it MUST be GPT. (Didn't try it so far, but in 1-2 weeks I can confirm).

Read about some NVMe drives that are not bootable at all.

 

My system partition is so small I have to symlink to see a BBD jpeg!