James shows how to get the most from your hard drives and SSDs
Storage is a constant concern with any system. If you're not worried about the amount of space you have, you might be worried about the speed it runs at or the gradual effects of aging - not to mention the ever-present, unpredictable threat of a catastrophic drive failure.
For those reasons, improving your system's storage should never be too far from your mind. And in case you're not sure how much thought to give it, we've put together this collection of our tips and expert advice for making storage upgrades.
Replacing Your Hard Drive
Replacing your hard drive with a new one is one of the simplest upgrades you can make to a system, assuming you have space to hook an additional drive up. And if you haven't, it's probably because you've done it before.
Assuming you don't want to do a fresh installation of your operating system, all you have to do is open your PC, connect the new hard drive's SATA data and power connectors up, boot your PC, copy the data from the old drive to the new drive, shut down your PC, disconnect and remove the original drive and then install and reconnect the new one in its place. If you're a rookie, the only truly difficult part is making sure all the data is copied over, so use a transfer utility such as 'Windows Easy Transfer' to ensure that it's been done properly.
Mounting the now operational drive doesn't require a huge amount of thought. It's good to leave a fair amount of space around the drive to minimise heat retention, but it's incredibly rare for hard drives to be negatively affected by heat build-up, so take that advice without too much urgency. Most of the real problems are only likely to occur when you first connect the new drive up. If you make it past that point, the hard part is done.
If you're unlucky and the new drive doesn't appear in Windows, the first time you connect it up, you'll need to check in your BIOS whether the hardware is actually being detected by your motherboard. When you boot your system, enter your BIOS menu (you usually have to press F2 or Del when you hear the POST beep to get to that point) and find the SATA settings. Usually, this will be under the heading 'integrated peripherals', but it may be something more straightforward, like 'storage'.
In the BIOS, you should be able to see the new drive listed. If you can't, check that your drive controllers are all enabled. If they are, switch off the PC and doublecheck the data and power connectors. Unless something is faulty, it should be visible in the BIOS. You may want to try using different SATA ports and cables to check. As a last resort, swap the SATA power and data cables out of your working drive and into the new one. If it still doesn't work, it's likely something serious is wrong with the drive.
If the drive appears in your BIOS but not Windows, you'll have to look at the Windows device manager. Find the drive under the 'Disk Drives' section. If there are any problems affecting detection (such as a driver issue), then you should be able to find a notification and resolve it here. Try removing the drive, rebooting and then allowing it to auto-detect again. If that doesn't work, it's likely some serious problem is affecting it, and it might be worth finding a replacement.
It's worth noting, of course, that if your old hard drive is still in a usable condition, it doesn't make any sense to throw it out completely. Instead, you'll have to make a few more decisions about how to use it.
Adding A Second Drive
If you add a second drive to your system, it often makes more sense to replace your primary drive with the new one rather than use the newer drive as a secondary storage unit. There are circumstances in which this doesn't apply, but it's easy to work out whether you should keep an old drive or not by following these simple rules:
1. Make Your Primary Drive The Biggest SSD You Can Afford
SSDs have super-quick access times, which make them ideal for running software from. Given the speed of modern CPUs, hard drive access times create a surprisingly large bottleneck for system performance, and Windows feels that particularly keenly. Run your operating system off an SSD, and your computer will boot faster and run more smoothly.
The only potential hitch is that 'largest SSD' might still be quite small in absolute terms. Ideally you want your SSD to be around 200GB in size, and we wouldn't recommend trying to run Windows off an SSD that was less than 100GB in size for any long period of time.
If you're adding your first SSD to a system, it should absolutely be the primary drive. If you're adding a second SSD to your system, then unless one is significantly smaller than the other, you'll have to go to rule 2.
2. Use The Newer Drive As The Primary One
Not all of us can afford (or particularly want) an SSD, but if you have two mechanical drives to pick between, then you have to weigh up your options.
For the most part, mechanical drive performance is fairly flat across all brands, with similar access times and drive speeds. Unless you have one drive that is significantly slower (perhaps it's a low-noise or energy-efficient drive, for example), then you're certain to get better performance out of whichever drive is newer.
This is partly because the newer drive won't have a cluttered, fragmented file system and partly because bad sectors become more likely to appear on drives as they age. The older your primary drive is, the greater the chance something catastrophic can happen to your data.
In practical terms, any recent mechanical drive will have a good enough capacity to run Windows and applications without space becoming an issue, so there's no need to take the size of a drive into consideration.
Use age as a rule of thumb, with speed as your secondary concern: a five-year old drive is probably too old to trust with a fresh Windows installation, regardless of size. If the drives are close in age, then a 500GB drive isn't any more likely to run Windows better than a 1TB drive, but a 7200rpm 3.5" drive will give better performance than a 5400rpm 3.5" drive.
3. Don't Forget To Recondition Your Old Drive
Most systems support at least two 3.5" drives, and as many as four isn't uncommon (though you may need to install 5.25" bay converters so you can properly mount them all), which means that if a hard drive isn't in good condition and not nearing the end of its operational life, you can easily reuse it.
For various reasons it's not a good idea to leave Windows intact on your secondary drive. Some applications might get confused by the presence of two Windows systems, and there's always the chance your boot loader will have similar trouble making the distinction. Even if you've done a fresh installation on your new primary drive, you'll have to do a bit of spring-cleaning before you can consider it ready to put to work.
At its easiest, all you need to do is open the drive in Windows Explorer and delete the contents you don't want. If you cloned the drive to your new primary storage, you can simply quick format the drive to leave it empty. If you didn't clone the drive but want to keep some of your data (like documents and software), you'll need to manually sort through the files and delete the ones you don't want.
If you're keeping files on there, it might be a good idea to take advantage of the additional space and defragment the drive, which will consolidate the files and free space, speeding up access times. If you're wiping the drive completely, there's no need to do this. In both cases, run a full scandisk just to evaluate the condition of the drive. If you see bad sectors, it's starting to die and probably ready to be junked. If it doesn't have any major errors, you can continue using it as normal!