Hard Drive Upgrade

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 5:15 pm Post subject: Hard Drive Upgrade

I'm looking to upgrade my hard drive because the one I currently have is absolutely packed. This is the only part that I haven't upgraded before, so I had a few questions about it.

My current HD is roughly 120GB's.

Should I buy a large HD and use it and hang on to my current HD as a backup?

How do I transfer my files over?

If I were to keep both hard drives installed, how would they work along with one another? Could I simply drag and drop between HD's?

Sorry for my ignorance on this subject, but like I said, I've never messed with an upgrade of a hard drive or moving about of files between them.

Any help or links will be appreciated.
_________________

{uZa}Lonesome Eagle · Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 6:42 pm Post subject:

Assuming you have a SATA hard drive now, you almost certainly have another SATA connection on your motherboard, so just buy the new drive and a SATA cable (usually not included, but only $8 or so. Be sure you have an extra SATA power connector from the power supply as well. If not, you will need some kind of spliter so you can get another power connection. Most recent cases / power supplies have tons of connections though, so chances are you are already good for power.

Connect the new hard drive, and use "Computer Management / Disk Management" in the "Administrative Tools" folder to partition the drive (NTFS). It will be assigned the next available drive letter. Then format it by right clicking the drive in "My Computer" and doing a "quick format".

Go into BIOS to be sure it is set to not be in the "boot" rotation, so it won't try to boot from it. Then just drag and drop stuff from your old hard drive as desired. Now you will have two hard drives, and can copy stuff back and forth as you like.

If you want to stay with only one hard drive, you can just replace the one you have with a nice big (350gig or something) new one. The best approach here is to buy the big new hard drive (and cable if needed) and hook it up. Disconnect the old drive's SATA cable, so Windows doesn't see it and get all confused about which drive you want to use as the boot / Windows drive. Then go into BIOS and tell it to boot from your CD/DVD drive first, then the new drive as second boot device. Now boot from your Windows CD and install Windows to the new drive, when it it done, reconnect the old drive, boot up, install your programs and copy all your data (my documents, call of duty stuff, etc, etc) from the OLD drive to the new big Windows drive. Then you can just format the old drive, take it out and give it to a friend or something.

Obviously quicker and easier to just add a new drive (whatever size you can afford) so you don't have to reinstall Windows and all your programs. Leave the old small Windows drive and just move stuff off of it over to the new drive to make room.

Eagle

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 7:19 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the quick response Eagle. You answered a lot of concerns I had.

Would you recommend buying and using a new HD by itself because of the faster speeds, or would it make that much of a difference than using it as a secondary drive?
_________________

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 7:23 pm Post subject:

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 7:36 pm Post subject:

First thing of course is to ensure that your drive is SATA and not IDE. If it is SATA, it will have a thin data connection to the motherboard. If it is IDE, it will have a wide (like 30 pins) ribbon cable.

Everything I said above will still work with IDE (be sure to buy another IDE drive), but you will need to 1) make sure you have two heads on your IDE cable (or buy one with two heads if not) and 2) set both drives, using the jumpers on the botton / back to "cable select" and then connect the ribbon cable as needed to determine which drive is "master" and which is "slave". The connector at the END of the cable is for the "master, and the one in the middle is for the "slave".

Eagle
_________________

________

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 8:17 pm Post subject:

Here is my old one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148039

I guess I will be going with the 2 HD setup then. I'll search around for some deals and see what I can come up with.

Thanks for all your help Eagle. It's much appreciated.

Cool

_________________

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 11:08 pm Post subject:

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:48 am Post subject:

I prefer running 2+ drives... 1 for windows and programs, and the other(s) for file storage... Helps keep the fragmentation of the primary drive to a minimum, and also with 3 or 4 HDD's, I get excellent backup of files...
_________________
Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 4:32 pm Post subject: