Upgrade HDD

[Lea Hayes]

Hi all!

I have just purchased a brand new 'WD Raptor X 10,000 RPM SATA' hard drive
to replace my existing one. The new HDD is a LOT faster and I expect to get
some amazing speed improvements when using my Vista computer and games.

How can I transfer everything from my previous HDD to the new one? I do not
want to add the new HDD in as a secondary, I want to completely remove the
old one!

I have done some searching on the net, however people are saying that it
will invalidate the Vista activation, or something or other......this can't
be right!?!? Some people are even saying that you can only change your HDD
once!

Any help would be great!

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi Lea,

Check with Western Digital here for a drive copy utility:
http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp

Don't expect too much performance increase unless you were a) heavily paging
(in which case more memory would be a better solution) or b) replacing a
very old IDE drive running at 5400 or lower.

You can replace the hard drive without purchasing a new license as many
times as you deem necessary. At some point you may need to reactivate the
installation as the hardware changes accumulate, but that is nothing more
than a phone call.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Lea Hayes]

Hi Rick,

Thank you for your help! I didn't realize that WD offerred a free drive copy
utility!

My old HDD's seek time is about 9.8ms whereas the new one is 4.6ms. A friend
of mine said that this should be a lot faster...however I am far from being a
hardware expert. The HDD in my newer machine seems very slow when it is doing
several things at a time, I didn't have this issue on my older XP computer.
So I guessed that it would be either the hard disk itself, or maybe a
difference in the way Vista manages disk scheduling (probably the former).

Thanks again,
Lea Hayes

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Yes, replacing the system drive will likely require reactivation of Vista.
The system drive is much more important in the activation scheme in Vista
than it was in XP. However, reactivation is not a problem. If activation
over the internet is declined you will be presented with a phone activation
screen and that should only take you five minutes or so.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi Lea,

Most drive manufacturers have them. They used to be included in the box on
floppy, but most just make them available for download now.

Just as a point of information, when programs run they run from memory, not
the hard drive. Basically, when a program or data is called on, it is copied
from the hard drive to memory (either physical ram or the paging file or a
combination of both). It is during the initial loading that you may find
some improvement. Once it's loaded into memory, the seek rate on the drive
will have a negligible effect unless a fair amount of paging is required.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com