Hard Drive Choice Delema

We'll start with the basics
My OS is related to the problem.. I'm currently running off a Linux Mint flash drive.. before the problems started.. it was windows 7.
It's not a brand name computer... it was built to spec by magic micro.. (tail end of 2017)
I'm running 2 SSDs.. 250G and 1TB
16 gigs RAM
Older mother board & CPU - gen 6 intel 6700 quad core
I'm not sure what other info you'd need
Belarc isn't going to help me on Linux.

I've been through a bunch of diagnostics and am pretty sure I have a failing hard drive.. lots of 1 0 errors when trying to reinstall/fix windows 7 and trying to install Linux instead... and partitioning. I guess it could be a driver for that SSD though. I don't know how to test for that in Linux.
It blue screened me while windows was performing it's own C drive cleanup.

It's the 250 GB drive that isn't reading.. and I'm pretty sure that's where the OS was installed.

Since there are two in the box, my question is, how do I know which one of the two to pull and replace? There's no nomenclature on the visible area of the drives.

 

A shot in the dark would be the smaller 250GB size drive is the SSD. As for the physical the SSD will be the smaller drive, maybe 1/4" thick. The old spinning drive would be thicker, like 3/4" to an inch.

 

There are no old spinning drives.. they are both SSDs

I had hoped that there was a standard of putting them in the tower by capacity.. one over the other.

 

That is why I said a shot in the dark, given the age of the system one would expect a small SSD with a large HDD. If you pull the drives I'm sure they are maked with the capacity. If you don't want to take them out, unplug one and boot up and see which one is still connected, process of elimination.

 

It was built to spec for me.. and I was over spinning drives.

The email I opened right before this one.. I finally heard from the builder.. it's the bottom one.. I only have to unplug one! yeah

The arthritis in my hands makes SATA connections really challenging.

I appreciate the reply.. I think I'm going to tackle it this evening