Not to belabor a point, but did you shut down your system and disconnect the other two physical drives and then turn it back on to see if the system sees it? I have had numerous situations where a USB drive would conflict with an existing drive on a system such as a CD or DVD or another drive on the system. Windows wants to assign drives in a certain priority. For instance, I could find that connecting a USB external hard drive would conflict with a DVD drive D: on a system because the operating system gave priority to the external hard drive. I would shut the system down and disconnect power to the DVD drive and then turn it back on. I could go into Administrator Tools in Control Panel, go to Computer management and then Disk Management. Go down the list in the bottom panel of drives, find the USB external drive, right click in the large panel to the right of the small one of the drive and select Change Drive letter. Then pick an used drive letter such as M and tell it to use that letter. It gives you a warning, but since nothing is actually using the drive such as software just say Ok. Then shut the system down. Reconnect the DVD drive and turn it back on. Then everything works fine. The DVD drive is back to being drive D: and the USB drive is now drive M: and no more conflicts. This is why I suggested that you disconnect the power to the other hard drives and a DVD if you have it. If that works and you can now see the USB, then I would suggest that you go through the series I talked about prior and actually change the drive letter of the USB drive to one that isn't being used because if you don't then the conflict will continue anytime you try to use the PCIe adapter. Changing the drive letter will not affect the cloning with the Samsung software. Once again, if you need to talk to me to get some voice help. just PM me and I'll be glad to help.

Have you downloaded and installed the Samsung software to do the clone? If not, do that and see if it sees the drive since it can recognize them. Also download and install the Samsung Magician software as well. Also, try shutting down your system and then restarting it with the adapter and drive attached. If it still doesn't see it you could have a drive letter conflict with the system wanting to assign the same drive letter to two different disks. In that case, turn your system off and open the case. Since you are wanting to clone the PCIe drive, disconnect the power cables from the other two physical drives temporarily. Turn your system back on and see if the new PCIe in the adapter now shows up. If it does, then go ahead and run the Samsung cloning software. Once it is complete, swap the new PCIe for the existing one in your system. Reconnect the two other drives and turn the system back on. If you get a BIOS message that it has detected a new device just follow the screen prompts. Sometimes a USB device wants to fight for control of a drive letter.

In that case you should have no problem. Just download the Samsung software from their site and install it. Have your new PCIe attached to the system. The Samsung software will see it and just a couple of clicks and it will proceed. It does not change your existing drive. Once it's finished, shut down your system and swap out the drives before powering the system back up. The reason why is that the new drive will have the exact same system identification encoding and your system will not like having two that are the same. You may get a BIOS warning that it sees a new device and wants you to go into it and confirm. Just follow the on screen prompts and you should be fine. Just hold on to that old drive until you have had time to check everything out and give you some time to run things. Whole process shouldn't take more than a couple of hours if that much. Good luck!

Yep. It also looks like it may have made some subtle changes to the exposure, white balance and hue possibly. I did not ask it to do those things, but I also didn't look at any of the automatic settings before using it. I was just "playing" with it right out of the "box".

Suggest you look at the Dell Outlet where they have both refurbished and overstock system including gaming ones. I bought a G5 15 refurbished laptop there over three years ago with a high end nVidia graphics in it with plenty of drive space in a PCIe drive and a SSD. Came with a full year of next day onsite support and repair if needed and I added a couple more years and accidental damage as well for a few dollars more. I had a computer and networking business for over 25 years and recommended Dell products to all of my clients because of their quality and warranty.

I've been using iDrive for several years now with total satisfaction on both its pricing and how well it works. I see from your post that you have quite a lot to backup. One of the services that iDrive offers to get you started if you have a lot to backup for the initial backup is they will send you a drive to copy everything you want backed up on to and then you send it back to them where they then copy it all into your account so that you don't have to go through days of Internet usage to get started.

I own a couple of systems with PCIe drives. I bought an external PCIe case to use to replace the original drives with larger ones. It worked quite well. I use only Samsung drives and they have free cloning software that works with their drives. Have used it many times on different systems without any issues. So, good luck with your upgrades!

Do you actually have three physical drives or do you have a single drive with three partitions on it? My guess is that it is one physical drive. If that is so and you are using Windows as your operating system, it is possible to both shrink and increase the size of the partitions. What is on your Drive D: and how much space is used and how much open on it? Same thing for Drive E:. If you're okay to do so, turn off your system and open the case to see how many drives are actually in it. Or you can use Administrator Tools in Control Panel and then select Computer Management. Once there open Disk Management and it will show you the physical drives as well as the partitions. This is also where you can shrink and expand partitions. If you only have one physical drive, cloning to a new drive will not change your issue as the cloning software will create a mirror image of what you currently have with the same size drives. HOWEVER, before you attempt any changes, make sure you have everything backed up. If you don't have a local backup, then you should purchase an external drive of at least 2TB to use as a backup to perform an image backup of your system. The software to do this is in Control Panel as well. It is Backup (Windows 7) and is pretty straight forward. Connect your external drive and ignore any software it may already have on it and want to install on your system because the Windows Backup will wipe the drive as part of the backup and it will only be usable for Windows Backup. Open Backup and select Image backup on the left hand selection area. If you do not have an actual DVD copy of the operating system, then you should have a DVD-RW disk available to create a boot disk at the end of the image backup process. If you don't have an internal DVD-RW drive, you can get one off Amazon for just a few bucks. If all this is too technical for you, then ask around to find a reputable local computer repair shop and talk to them about your problem. Take your system with you so they can look and see exactly what you have, and they should be able to tell you your options including what I have posted here. I'm retired after 30+ years in the computer and networking business, and I can't count the number of times I have performed exactly this process without problems. But, I always backup as I have described first because there is always a first time. If you need further discussion, then PM me and I'll be glad to help.

Well, if we're going to go there then shouldn't this apply to any post processing? People have been playing with post processing since the days of darkrooms and dodging to modify the printing process. I agree that actually taking parts of one shot and combining it with parts from another is not a true representation of either photograph, but it's been going on for years by using layers. Cropping to eliminate unwanted parts of a shot. Is that a true representation of the actual photograph? This kind of "moral/ethical" question can be discussed forever with no real conclusion except one's own opinion. The AI is not really an accurate name for it, but it's the technology buzzword of the present. It is just improved capabilities within the post processing software world of digital imaging. Also, remember that Photoshop is used by literally millions of graphics people for all kinds of purposes. Just some thoughts.

That is just one of the uses of it, and I agree with that part of the capabilities. But, you have to remember that the software isn't just for photographers. Probably more graphics people use it than photographers. I have used and uploaded a couple of shots showing how well it removes unwanted objects, and how quick and efficient it does this. Will it be abused? Probably so, but it will also be a beneficial tool when needed. Sometimes to get the shot you want, there are objects that you can't just wait for them to go away or else the subject matter is gone as well. This fact goes all the way back to dodging in the darkroom to eliminate or minimize them. So, the need has been around for a long time and the capabilities in post processing software as well.

Downloaded the Photoshop AI Beta to try out the new regeneration feature. Here's a straight jpeg out of my D7200 and then the regeneration version. I just used the remove part of it to take out things from the pic. Pretty impressive how simple, quick and good it is to use. Took just a couple of minutes to complete.

Check out the Panasonic Lumix line. High quality and full featured.

Lots of suggestions in the past with most of them still being appropriate at this time. Not sure what post processing software you will be using, but they are all becoming more dependent on better graphics capabilities, more memory and faster processors. Drive space is really determined by how much photography you will be doing and how you wish to manage and keep things. I spent 30 plus years in the computer business and would recommend that you look at Dell's Outlet store online. I often buy refurbished there because the problems they had have been fixed and are no more, and possibly less likely to have any more than a new system. Dell usually sells them with the exact same warranty as a new unit and it is normally a one year next day on-site repair for any hardware. You can add more years and accidental damage coverage for not a lot more money if you desire. I have found their warranty service to be quite good. Buy more system than you think you need so you can grow into it as time goes by instead of growing out of it.

Artificial intelligence has been around since the beginning of mankind. Just look around you and you see it every day.

If you can see that you actually have two physical drives, then it is most likely that one of the drives is partitioned into two logical drives. Most likely C: and D: with E: being the second physical drive or it could be that the partitioned drives could be C: and E: depending on how the system was set up. In either case, you can go to Control Panel (assuming this is a Windows system), the select Administrative Tools, Computer Management and then look for Disk Management. This screen will show you the physical drives in your system and the partitions on them. If your C: drive is a partition along with a larger partition D: or E: on that drive, then there is another option available. You can actually shrink or expand partitions on a physical drive. So let's say your drive is actually a 1TB SSD drive with a 200GB C: partition and the other 800GB partition is either drive D: or E:. And, the drive D: or E: only has 100GB of space used. You could shrink that drive down to say 200 or 300GB which would leave 500 or 600GB of unclaimed space. You could then expand your drive C: to collect that free space so that you would end up with a drive C: with a total of 700 to 800GB. However, you should perform a complete image backup of that physical drive before attempting to do this or anything else that has been recommended on this blog. That can be best performed by connecting an external drive to your system and using the Backup application contained in Control Panel that comes with Windows. It is a fairly simple process. You just want to have either the original Windows operating system disk and a DVD-RW drive with a writeable blank disk or an USB drive that the system can use to create a boot disk from as part of the backup process to be used for installing the image should it be needed. I spent 30 plus years building systems, networks and repairs and troubleshooting them, and I have always recommended this type of backup for everyone to perform at least monthly. This type of backup is what is part of a drive cloning process as well. It allows you to restore a drive back to where it was when the image was created without having to reinstall anything. I actually perform one monthly and then perform a data cloud backup daily automatically. That way if a drive gets infected or dies, I can put a new drive in and restore the image and then restore my data from the cloud and lose nothing but some time. Hope this helps.