Installing 2nd HDD, any tips for first timer?

thezeronumber · 25 Mar 2011 at 14:52

I got a new GPU recently and i have finally been able to do something i wanted for ages: Recording games at 60+ fps! The current 320gb i have is great for general use but there isn't much room left on it for Fraps footage, and as most of you will know it is very space hungry. I've got a 1TB HDD here which would be used solely for recording footage on, but before i go ahead and give the installation a go i thought it would be best to show myself here in case there is some stuff i'm missing out on. I've got the general idea of it all but never any harm in double-checking.

I do have one question, although it may seem silly to some. My Motherboard has several SATA slots; one of them being orange (current HDD in this one), the other one white, and the rest red. Does it matter what coloured port i choose to plug the cable into? Will it affect which HDD is used as the main one for installing programmes and data on? I would like to use the current 320gb HDD as my main one, but have the 1TB in there ready for Fraps content.

brigzilla · 25 Mar 2011 at 17:41

Unless your using it in raid then it doesn't really matter, just change the default boot device to your os drive in the bios if it changes it to the new drive

Surveyor · 25 Mar 2011 at 23:14

The orange and white ports are for the Silicon Image controller.

The red ports are from the Intel chipset.

Connect both your drives to the red ports as the Intel ones are the best to use.

thezeronumber · 25 Mar 2011 at 23:53

I had kept my main (320gb) in the orange port and placed my secondary (1tb) in one of the red ports, but i can always move both to red when i next get the chance. Moving on, the Bios recognises both Hard-drives, both have automatic settings, and when running a system programme by the name of "speccy" it recognised the extra component and was able to take temperature readings. So far, so good.

However the extra HDD won't show up in 'My Computer'. I did a google search and tried to follow the many tutorials out there about how to format/partition the drive and assign it a letter for recognition using the Windows Computer/Disk Management, but despite the countless "right click and choose format/partition" steps i read, the same thing doesn't happen in my own tool. I can see both of the drives at the bottom, but only one is present at the top (my original unit). Can someone fill me in on what is going wrong and how i can get this working? Getting very confused at the moment.

Surveyor · 26 Mar 2011 at 00:06

Look here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

thezeronumber · 26 Mar 2011 at 00:27

Wait, volume = partition/format? I just proceeded with "simple volume" creation and now it seems to work fine... All of this confusion because the tutorials i had found never refereed to volume, instead they kept on saying partition or format, bah! Thanks for the help.