bit of a dilema with my hard drive upgrade

[TigerUK]

I have two hardd rives.

{A} a non-descript 160GB 5400rpm hard drive win the OS which is on it's way out.

{B} And a Western Digital 500GB 5400rpm storage drive from downloads etc.


Now I want to upgrade {A}, the boot up is a bit slow and the hardd rive is making a lot of groaning noises which is leading me to think it's become ineffcient. My plan is to get a 1TB hard drive, since they're so cheap..

Move contents of {A} ---> {B} and make B the primary hard drive for OS. ANd then then new 7200rpm hard drive as the new sotrage hard drive {C}.

So then I'm left with

{B} Winows etc western digital cavair 500GB 5400rpm etc.

{C} 1TB 7400rpm storage drive.

the {A} will be removed and binned.


Now my concern is that the cavair won't be so useful as a primary OS hard drive, and I should swap it around, but I'm not so keen on the OS hard drive being massive, and the sotrage hard drive being small.

What do you guys think?

 

[Weazle]

You can partition the 1 TB drive out using the Windows setup.

- Leave drives {A} & {B} alone, put them on later SATA channels or secondary IDE.
- Put drive {C} as main, load up Windows installation and you can create a partition, say 200GB-500GB for OS drive
- Once Windows have loaded up, use disk admin (under administrative tools) to create a logical partition with the rest of the hard drive, drive {D}
- You can then copy stuff to/from the other drives to the new partition.

You'll end up with 4 drives logically but physically 3 drives in total

 

[Syx]

Hi,

With the complexity of moving the data across aside, you've not stated what you'll be using this setup for.
My initial thoughts would be that it doesn't matter - and in actual fact for my setup I'd prefer the storage drive to be the better performing drive.

I would like to know why you think that the Caviar won't be that useful?

 

[TigerUK]

@Syx, the caviar is 5400rpm, I thought it would be best to go for a 7200rpm hard drive as main???

@Weazle, I think the 160GB is redundant right now and I don't need to have 3 hard drives in there, two would be fine. thw 160GB is groany and past it's prime, and the capacity is tiny compared to what I can get for £40 these days, I'd rather donate it to someone who is on a shoestring than keep it running in my computer

 

[Weazle]

Essentially you install the OS on the new drive, while preserving your old drives just in case your Windows install goes boobs up

Once you finished copying files off the old 160GB, just take it out of the machine.

 

[TigerUK]

Essentially you install the OS on the new drive, while preserving your old drives just in case your Windows install goes boobs up

Once you finished copying files off the old 160GB, just take it out of the machine.

I would have done this before, but installing a new os, importing program setting, installing programs takes days, sometimes weeks.

I decided to clone the drives instead.

I dragged and dropped the contents of the sotrage drives, and clined {A} into {B} using acronis. It took me about 5 or 6 hours, but it's all done now. Finally I don't have to listen to the groaning hard drive. I'll be another year or so until the current windows drive starts groaning again, probably.