installing second hard drive
April 22, 2018 11:58 AM Subscribe
Is it possible, or advisable, to install a second hard drive in my new tower? I recently purchased a new tower with Win10. It has a 480GB SSd and a 1TB regular drive. My old PC has Win7.
The new case is large with several open slots. Someone made the comment that I could install my old hard drive in one of the bays as it too has 1TB.
As a tangent, I understand that outside of programs that Windows has to see on C drive, it is possible to chose for programs, or at least their files, to install on the non SSD drive.
Thanks in advance.
The new case is large with several open slots. Someone made the comment that I could install my old hard drive in one of the bays as it too has 1TB.
As a tangent, I understand that outside of programs that Windows has to see on C drive, it is possible to chose for programs, or at least their files, to install on the non SSD drive.
Thanks in advance.
Yes, this is super easy. 2 cables and you're done. Then, as Autumnheart says, you'll have 3 drives and more internal storage. I always do this when I get a new computer so I can make sure I have access to all my old files.
Old Windows files will just sit around and take up space. They won't run any more. Drives have a sort of order of priority for startup and for you, the ssd is set to go first.
posted by irisclara at 1:07 PM on April 22, 2018
Old Windows files will just sit around and take up space. They won't run any more. Drives have a sort of order of priority for startup and for you, the ssd is set to go first.
posted by irisclara at 1:07 PM on April 22, 2018
You can take the old computer’s hard drive and put it into your new computer, but do you have a good reason to do so (right now)?
- Computers often fail very early (infant mortality) or much later (end of life). You may want to hold off until you have confidence that the new computer has passed the curve, lest you have two broken computers instead of only one.
- Your old hard drive has been used the most, and in theory is the most likely to fail. Putting it into a new computer and then storing data on the most unreliable hard drive doesn’t make a lot of sense.
- Your old hard drive duplicates a lot of things that are already on your new computer, like the operating system and applications. You would need to spend some effort to simply clean out the hard drive in order to get the most use out of its storage space, but this also incurs the possibility of deleting something important.
- If you’ve encrypted your old hard drive, possibly with your Windows login, you may not be able to access anything already on the drive when it is out of its original system.
posted by meowzilla at 3:21 PM on April 22, 2018
- Computers often fail very early (infant mortality) or much later (end of life). You may want to hold off until you have confidence that the new computer has passed the curve, lest you have two broken computers instead of only one.
- Your old hard drive has been used the most, and in theory is the most likely to fail. Putting it into a new computer and then storing data on the most unreliable hard drive doesn’t make a lot of sense.
- Your old hard drive duplicates a lot of things that are already on your new computer, like the operating system and applications. You would need to spend some effort to simply clean out the hard drive in order to get the most use out of its storage space, but this also incurs the possibility of deleting something important.
- If you’ve encrypted your old hard drive, possibly with your Windows login, you may not be able to access anything already on the drive when it is out of its original system.
posted by meowzilla at 3:21 PM on April 22, 2018
Your other option is to just whack the old drive into an enclosure or docking station and connect it via USB. You won't get quite the speed that you would from SATA, but speed is what you've got the SSD for.
posted by pipeski at 4:25 PM on April 22, 2018
posted by pipeski at 4:25 PM on April 22, 2018
Most motherboards have ports/pins for at least 4 sata cables. It's just a matter of getting power for the drive and a data connection. A hard drive should be screwed into the case for stability. Either look at the silk screening on the board, or look for a manual to figure out where to plug in a sata cable on the board.
posted by TheAdamist at 6:14 PM on April 22, 2018
posted by TheAdamist at 6:14 PM on April 22, 2018
Yeah, it's very straightforward as long as you don't want to transfer Windows (which is itself not complex, but it is significantly riskier if you stuff up).
posted by Sebmojo at 9:03 PM on April 22, 2018
posted by Sebmojo at 9:03 PM on April 22, 2018
Yes, it's possible to install programs on one of the non-SSD drives, but you'll likely face a significant performance penalty, so I wouldn't recommend it.
posted by cnc at 9:33 AM on April 23, 2018
posted by cnc at 9:33 AM on April 23, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
Sure, you could totally do that. It would be your E drive and you’d have access to the files on it. Your computer wouldn’t be booting from that drive, so the fact that it’s got Win 7 Files shouldn’t really matter. If you felt like it, you could reformat the drive and erase the existing data (presumably after copying over the file you want to keep).
posted by Autumnheart at 12:07 PM on April 22, 2018 [2 favorites]