Looking for help on purchasing a second HD.

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Howdy guys, basically my hard drive is at the edge of being full, have around 20GB left, and the PC is become sluggish, so my brother and i put money together to get another simple HD, few questions regarding this.

I'm looking at http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-226-WD&tool=3 what are your thoughts? 1TB is prefered.

If i insert this drive, is it just a second drive it will see? How do i go about transfering games onto the drive to make them load up quicker etc without losing saved files for them? Is it just a simple case of drag and drop or?

How would i make it my MAIN hard drive also? If i wanted faster load up times etc, and use my current main one as a back up? I assume i can't do that since the OS is on the current one?

Also dumb question - do they provide you with a SATA cable also or do i have to buy that seperatly?

I suck so much when it comes to hard drives :( Thanks.
 
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Ian

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That's a good 1TB drive. :D As it's an OEM drive you'd need to buy a SATA cable, but they are cheap as chips.

If you wanted to make it your main drive, you'd need to clone it and move all your data over to the 2nd drive (easy enough with some free tools :)).

You can just use it as a 2nd drive, but you can't just drag and drop games on to it. You'd need to uninstall them and then re-install on the 2nd drive, but make a copy of the save game data first.
 
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So if i was to "clone" it, would that leave the OS on the old drive or? Bit confusing :( Don't think i am confident enough to reformat or whatever.
 

Ian

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Yep, you'd essentially be copying all of the information on your old drive to the new one. Once that was done, you would then boot from the new 1TB drive and either remove the old one or reformat it once you know the new one works properly.

If you aren't confident about reformatting, you can remove the old drive until you are certain that you have everything you need on the new drive.

Western Digital provide a copy of Acronis True image which makes the cloning process really easy:

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp
 

V_R

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Tbh, a fresh install may not be such a a bad idea, Thats what i'd do. Will give you a good chance to clean out all the crap that has built up. How old is the install?

Just install the OS on new drive and slave the old disk copying over your docs etc.

One of my 500gb drives is a WD Cavair Black, good drives! :)

Although that one you link to is Out of stock. Sammy F3's are good too.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-082-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279
 
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I would say it's roughly around 1 year old or something, can't remember when this PC was built by floppy and me, if floppy can remember when he came round then that's how old it is! :)

So make my old drive the slave (don't know how to do that) then install new OS on the new HDD and then just copy everything from old drive to new one then?
 

V_R

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Yep,

- Get all your drivers together before formatting (MB, Graphics, etc) and make sure you save anything you want to keep, like save games etc. (not to desperate as you can copy them from the old drive later if needed)
- Reinstall OS on new drive.
- Once the above is done connect old drive to PC
- Copy old doc's to new install on new drive.
- Then you can go about reinstalling games, programs etc.

Done

That should be pretty much it.

P.S: you should have a spare SATA cable with the MB, you usually get a few. :)
 

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