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Adding/Replacing hard drive on my desktop

Discussion in 'Techno-Magic' started by Sir Belisarius, Jun 11, 2011.

  1. Sir Belisarius

    Sir Belisarius Viconia's Boy Toy Distinguished Member ★ SPS Account Holder

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    Hey all - I'm hoping I can get some help on a question I have about replacing/adding a new hard drive to my desktop pc.

    I have a Dell XPS 730x 64-bit running Windows 7. It came with an ATA 300GB Western Digital hard drive (model # WDC WD3000HLFS 74G6UI). I'd like to add or replace this with a 1TB hard drive, but I'm wondering if I have to buy an ATA/IDE drive, or can I get a SATA drive for it?

    When I look at my pc's device manager, it has an ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller installed. Does that mean I can switch out the ATA for SATA with no other changes? If I keep the original drive in, can I only get an ATA drive to accompany it?

    Do I have to do the Master/Slave thing if I keep the ATA drive in. Do I NOT have to designate Master/Slave for SATA?

    Basically, I know enough about computers to be dangerous but not proficient. Any help would be appreciated.

    ~ Sir Bel
     
  2. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    Keeping the original 300GB drive as your primary and using the 1TB one for your bulk storage would be the easiest way as all you need is to buy a new hard drive (+ power cable) and a SATA cable and connect it. You'll find plenty of guides with images on Google on how to do it yourself (or videos on YT) - it's easy. Switching them around wouldn't be much harder either.

    You can connect both older and SATA drives on your computer; you can mix and match.

    There are no more jumper settings with SATA drives, you specify it all via the OS or BIOS.
     
  3. Merlanni

    Merlanni Veteran New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!)

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    It is easy. rest assured.

    You can put in the new one and use the old one for windows like you do now.

    better is to put in the new one in, the old one out and install windows on the new one. stuff like my documents you can retrieve later by plugging the old one in and drag the files to the new disk.

    Even better but more difficult is putting the new one in and making a partition on it while running your current situation. Install windows on the partition and all the other stuff on the other partition.

    Most expensive but best is put in a SSD and not and classic HDD. Install windows on the ssd together with the drivers, but everything else on de old conventional HDD.

    Partition: A way to divide a harddisk into two parts. mostly a small one for windows and a big one for the rest. When windows goes bad you reinstall it on that partion leaving the rest of the disk untouched.

    It is possible that during booting of the pc that you will see a menu asking wich windows. One is your old one, and the other is the new windows. Not dangerous what so ever.

    Pata is the old type of connection. The flat cable. never get one of those disks. Those are history. Now use a SATA. You can use ATA and Sata disk in the same pc.

    Avoid the real big hdd's of 3 TB. Windows has issues with it on most boards. It is to complicated to solve for you, so avoid it. max 2 terabyte will be enough. 1 terrabyte.
    is 1000GB

    Use a HDD with at least 32mb cache and 7200 rpm. Western Digital caviar blue series came best out of the test I read last.

    To install it into the case just screw it in like the old one and connect the cables. Find out if you have those cables in the box of the pc/motherboard or get them. There is a high rate of possibilty that you Power Supply Unit has the correct power cable, just get the data cable if needed. Don't be afraid, there is noting you can damage. There is no way to put the wrong cable in.

    Master and slave stuff is history with SATA.

    I forgot. Most likely you will need to format the disk if you do not install windows directly on it.

    ---------- Added 0 hours, 17 minutes and 19 seconds later... ----------

    Is your HDD a velociraptor? Nice. keep it running with windows and just add a new big one for data.

    ---------- Added 0 hours, 10 minutes and 52 seconds later... ----------

    IDE is the old one also knows as PATA. Avoid it.

    The new one is SATA sometime called Serial ATA, so people mix tham. PATA is Parallel Ata. it is confusing is you are not into this world.

    Again to clarify my own post: get an HDD with the Serial ATA 300 interface.

    (600 is next gen and has no better performance result with current and older pc's)
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2011
  4. Sir Belisarius

    Sir Belisarius Viconia's Boy Toy Distinguished Member ★ SPS Account Holder

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    Thanks for the info - it's never as easy as the instructions manual says. I put the hard drive in easy enough, got it formatted, and it works fine. So then I say to myself, "why not clone my old hard drive to the new 1TB drive and use the larger/faster disk as my primary?"

    The instructions made it seem easy enough. I opened the Seagate Diswizard, re-formatted the new disk into "primary", then selected Clone Drive. While the system was shutting down to reboot, the discwizard said the clone was successful, but when I try to change my boot order to the new drive (with the old drive disconnected), nothing happens. Windows fails to boot, and I just have a black screen with a white blinking _ on it.

    After I reconnected the original drive, I was able to boot up again, but the 1TB drive has nothing on it (it didn't clone), and now my pc is telling me I have a counterfeit copy of Windows 7. I entered the keycode from my original Windows Vista disk that came with the computer, plus the Windows 7 upgrade they game me - yet it's telling me the keycode is wrong now.

    WTF?

    Any suggestions?
     
  5. Blackthorne TA

    Blackthorne TA Master in his Own Mind Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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  6. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    For Windows, call Microsoft's support. For the drive, well, don't try cloning it (sorry for stating the obvious). Microsoft has some stupidity about hardware upgrades/changes causing Windows invalidation but I don't remember the details.
     
  7. Sir Belisarius

    Sir Belisarius Viconia's Boy Toy Distinguished Member ★ SPS Account Holder

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    Booooo...I just reformatted the drive to be storage. Windows seems to be working fine again. Oh well.
     
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