Question about 2 harddrives

DethThrasher · 13 Apr 2009 at 19:57

I currently have a 180GB HD which is running out of room. I want to buy a 500GB HD but i was wondering if i should have the 500GB one as the secondary one? or the other way round. Also if i want to move games with all my saves over to the 500GB HD do i just move the directory's in program files? thanks

FaceplantSi · 14 Apr 2009 at 00:24

If you simly move directories then the prog will probably not work.

I would think that you would see a speed increase using a modern drive as your boot drive and hence your best option would be to use a prog like Acronis True Image (free trial version available) to clone the whole of the existing HDD to the new one. Once that's done and tested you can safely formet the old drive which could then be used for data storage - docs and photos etc.

semi-pro waster · 14 Apr 2009 at 08:20

I'd be inclined to use the new drive for two reasons 1) it is probably going to be faster through advances in drive technology anyway and 2) a clean install of Windows helps in speed terms as well.

You can use a program such as TrueImage or Ghost to copy across the existing hard drive as FaceplanSi says, I would go for a fresh install myself but it depends on how important the way you've got your system running now is to you.

DethThrasher · 14 Apr 2009 at 21:02

Its not important but i have game saves and stuff and a lot of music

GodMac · 14 Apr 2009 at 22:18

The problem you have is that the easiest way to do the transfer is create an image of your Primary Active drive and then re-image your 500gb drive to be your Primary Active drive. Here lies the problem, if your current 180gb drive does not have enough space to store the image you plan on restoring to your 500gb drive then the only place to put it is on your 500gb drive, which you can't re-image if your image is already on there. Therefore, you need a 3rd drive to take the image of your current primary active (C

drive you can then restore to your new 500gb as your primary active. If I was you, I'd buy a cheap IDE drive to hold your images for future restore and image your 500gb. OR just rebuild your 500gb from scratch and keep your 180Gb as a standby if your 500gb ever fails and you loose the lot.