HDD question for a dummy....!!

Slimbert

Slimbert

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Damien
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I currently have two internal drives in my desktop, the main one (drive C) is 160GB, and the other is 250GB which I mainly use as an extra back-up for finished JPEGs from my paid work. I've no idea why the smaller is the main drive, it's just the way it came when I bought it. The trouble I'm having is that the 160GB one is filling up too quickly as soon as I get a back-log of raw files to process.....

Anyway, I'm looking to buy a larger drive to replace the 160GB one, probably 500GB, and then later replace the 250GB one also with a 500GB. These should do fine as I already have external drives for backing-up properly, but I really need the extra breathing space a 500GB drive would give me when I build up a back-log.

First question, should all modern HDD's be compatible with my modern motherboard etc, or are they like RAM i.e. DDR, DDR2 etc etc.....?

Secondly, I don't mind paying for reliability, so which brands should I be looking at? I've heard poor things about a couple of makes, and although I know they can all fail at any moment, I'd rather pay an extra couple of quid for a little extra peace of mind! :thumbs:

Finally, if I replaced my main drive with a brand new blank one, how would I get windows back up and running? I've only ever re-installed it....never done it from scratch!!

Any and all info will be greatly appreciated!! :D
 
If your current drives are SATA any SATA drive will work. If they are IDE then you need IDE drives.

When you install windows it will give you the option to format the drive, alternatively when you get it just plug it in to one of the other drives/or spare SATA ports and format it within Windows.

Oh all the major drives are fine, Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung etc.
 
People will probably come in and over-complicate it, but basically there are two (main) types of drive, SATA and IDE which is how they connect to your computer. Figure that out and buy the correct one, then install the new drive and clone the old one to the new one and you would avoid having to re-install windows et al.

There are different speeds of drive etc but what I put above is it in a nutshell

Hope that helps a little :lol:
 
Cheers guys!! :thumbs:

How will I tell the difference between the two types of drives?! :thinking: If I just guess, assume or leave anything to chance, it'll end up wrong!!
 
sata-ide-laptop-hard-drive.jpg


That should help ^

SATA have smaller connectors.
 
As for migrating your existing system, there's a few tools that will enable you to do so. None are without risk (disclaimer!) but I've had no probs so far.
http://clonezilla.org/ Clonezilla is my tool of choice but that's because I'm a Linux user anyway. A more user friendly tool is Norton Ghost but I've no personal experience of this.
Clonezilla is very effective but bloody slow, it's little more than a front-end with whistles to dd, a UNIX [data dump] command. Copies exactlyy bit-by-bit data from one drive to another.
 
As the OP is not a hardcore techy, maybe something like Driveimage XML would be a more user friendly option and there is a half decent Youtube tutorial to get you going.
 
I'm thinking you will have space for another IDE drive on your computer if you leave it as it is now. If you get your 500gb drive just install it into the extra ide slot on your motherboard then when importing your photos you can import them onto the new larger hdd instead of your c: drive.
 
CGeezer said:
I'm thinking you will have space for another IDE drive on your computer if you leave it as it is now. If you get your 500gb drive just install it into the extra ide slot on your motherboard then when importing your photos you can import them onto the new larger hdd instead of your c: drive.
Click to expand...

agreed.
 
I'm going to get my screwdriver out tomorrow and see what's what in there....:$

If it'll take a third drive then that's perfect, cheers for the tip John, really appreciate it!

Thanks again for all the advice guys!! :thumbs:
 
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