Need some advice please

R

rayz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 11, 2008
Messages
155
I currently have a 320gb Seagate that is just about maxed out. I intend on replacing that drive with the following:

WD Caviar Black 500gb WD5001AALS - Main Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

WD Caviar Green 1tb WD10EADS - Storage for music, video, etc
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136317

I know swapping the hardware and the data should be a relatively easy process, but I'd just like to confirm that I am not overlooking anything.

I'll first need to install the 1tb Green so I can transfer all of my music and video files. Should I partition this drive? Is there anything else I should do to prep it?

Once that's complete I'll then install the 500gb Black and re-install windows. I'm running XP home. I'm assuming I should partition this drive. I don't think I did that with the Seagate I'm currently using.

What I'm asking is:

-are my hardware choices solid?
-what do I need to take into consideration for this transfer?


All suggestion are welcome. My tech level is low to medium. I'm able to build a PC from the ground up and get it running. I'm not handy with BIOS or anything of the like.

Thanks in advance!
 
rayz said:
-are my hardware choices solid?
Click to expand...

Your choices are good and your plan is solid, but I would do things differently.

Just now you effectively have about 300GB of data you need to keep (on the Seagate 320 GB drive). You're planning to invest in a total of about 1.5 TB at the moment. This will obviously give you a lot of headroom (and we all like headroom in this game), but consider the following.

Rather than getting 2 drives at the moment you buy a single 1TB Caviar Black drive. You create a partition on this drive of roughly 50 GB for Windows/applications/games (adjust to your personal preference, there was someone the other day who said they'd need about 100 GB for their games) then use the rest of the capacity for storage (you'll have approximately 880 GB left over if you use 50 GB for the Windows partition). This means you'll have plenty of headroom for the current data you've got to store (the ~300 GB on the Seagate). If you're reading this and you're worried about how you'll recover the files from the Seagate don't worry. You remove the Seagate, connect up the 1TB Black drive and install Windows. Once Windows is installed and you've made the partition on the Black drive for storage (the ~880 GB) you then connect up the Seagate you had connected before. Even though it's got an installation of Windows on it the system won't try to boot from it (as long as you've got the boot device settings correct in the BIOS) and when you boot into Windows you'll see everything that was on the drive before. You'll then be able to copy the files across from the Seagate to the storage partition on the Black.

Once you've filled up the storage partition on the Black (6 months? 12 months? more?) you invest in a new storage drive. You'll be able to get a better deal on the drive in the future (you'll probably be able to get a 2TB drive for close to the price of a 1TB drive in 12 months time) and at that point in time you'll have a lot more headroom than if you buy 1.5 TB of drives right now.

As for partitioning a drive when installing Windows XP it's a very easy procedure and it's a worthwhile one to do whether you're sticking to the original plan you proposed or changing to do something like the above. If you look at this guide scroll down to the section titled "Step #3". Read through this section. The important step is the one which begins with "If the hard disk is unpartitioned, you can create and size the partition on which you will install Windows XP Professional." When you select this option you'll need to type in how big you want the partition to be. By default it will automatically fill in the full capacity of the disk, but you want to restrict that to 50 GB (or whatever you decide is appropriate). Get a calculator, multiply 50 by 1024 and type in that number. Then, once the Windows installation is complete you can create the storage partition for the rest of the capacity. The benefit of partitioning the Boot drive is that you can format the partition with Windows on it but leave the rest of the data on the drive alone. If you were forced to partition your current Seagate drive you would lose all of your data, not just Windows and your applications. It also makes things quicker/easier when doing tasks like defragmenting files or virus scanning.

Have you thought about how you're going to backup the new capacity you're adding?
 
amp88 said:
Your choices are good and your plan is solid, but I would do things differently.

Just now you effectively have about 300GB of data you need to keep (on the Seagate 320 GB drive). You're planning to invest in a total of about 1.5 TB at the moment. This will obviously give you a lot of headroom (and we all like headroom in this game), but consider the following.

Rather than getting 2 drives at the moment you buy a single 1TB Caviar Black drive. You create a partition on this drive of roughly 50 GB for Windows/applications/games (adjust to your personal preference, there was someone the other day who said they'd need about 100 GB for their games) then use the rest of the capacity for storage (you'll have approximately 880 GB left over if you use 50 GB for the Windows partition). This means you'll have plenty of headroom for the current data you've got to store (the ~300 GB on the Seagate). If you're reading this and you're worried about how you'll recover the files from the Seagate don't worry. You remove the Seagate, connect up the 1TB Black drive and install Windows. Once Windows is installed and you've made the partition on the Black drive for storage (the ~880 GB) you then connect up the Seagate you had connected before. Even though it's got an installation of Windows on it the system won't try to boot from it (as long as you've got the boot device settings correct in the BIOS) and when you boot into Windows you'll see everything that was on the drive before. You'll then be able to copy the files across from the Seagate to the storage partition on the Black.

Once you've filled up the storage partition on the Black (6 months? 12 months? more?) you invest in a new storage drive. You'll be able to get a better deal on the drive in the future (you'll probably be able to get a 2TB drive for close to the price of a 1TB drive in 12 months time) and at that point in time you'll have a lot more headroom than if you buy 1.5 TB of drives right now.

As for partitioning a drive when installing Windows XP it's a very easy procedure and it's a worthwhile one to do whether you're sticking to the original plan you proposed or changing to do something like the above. If you look at this guide scroll down to the section titled "Step #3". Read through this section. The important step is the one which begins with "If the hard disk is unpartitioned, you can create and size the partition on which you will install Windows XP Professional." When you select this option you'll need to type in how big you want the partition to be. By default it will automatically fill in the full capacity of the disk, but you want to restrict that to 50 GB (or whatever you decide is appropriate). Get a calculator, multiply 50 by 1024 and type in that number. Then, once the Windows installation is complete you can create the storage partition for the rest of the capacity. The benefit of partitioning the Boot drive is that you can format the partition with Windows on it but leave the rest of the data on the drive alone. If you were forced to partition your current Seagate drive you would lose all of your data, not just Windows and your applications. It also makes things quicker/easier when doing tasks like defragmenting files or virus scanning.

Have you thought about how you're going to backup the new capacity you're adding?
Click to expand...

Thank you for the reply! It seems that you know exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and your suggestions make great sense. I really appreciate it.

I'm really leaning towards having a second drive dedicated to storage. There may be instances when I will want to remove the drive for use as an external with a laptop or to transfer files to another machine at another location. If I go this route, it sounds like having a 500gb/640gb main drive might be overkill if all I'll be doing is running windows, games and apps which brings up two questions
- Should I maybe consider a lower capacity drive with fewer plates for the main?
-If the main drive will be dedicated to OS, games and apps, would you still recommend partitioning it even though I will not be storing any data files (long term)? I'll still occasionally be downloading data to this drive. The intent of the backup drive will be a more permanent data storage target.

In regards to backup, I have not thought about that very much. It's definitely a concern and I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks again!
 
rayz said:
Thank you for the reply! It seems that you know exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and your suggestions make great sense. I really appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Glad to help :)

rayz said:
I'm really leaning towards having a second drive dedicated to storage. There may be instances when I will want to remove the drive for use as an external with a laptop or to transfer files to another machine at another location.
Click to expand...

Ok, good point.

rayz said:
If I go this route, it sounds like having a 500gb/640gb main drive might be overkill if all I'll be doing is running windows, games and apps which brings up two questions
- Should I maybe consider a lower capacity drive with fewer plates for the main?
-If the main drive will be dedicated to OS, games and apps, would you still recommend partitioning it even though I will not be storing any data files (long term)? I'll still occasionally be downloading data to this drive. The intent of the backup drive will be a more permanent data storage target.
Click to expand...

It's up to you if you want to go for a smaller drive for the OS/Games/Apps but you'll generally find that drives < 500 GB are now worse value for money than ones of 640 GB - 1 TB (and that's not even counting the 'special' drives like Raptors and Velociraptors). If you feel like you want a smaller drive there's nothing stopping you but you probably won't be saving a significant amount of money if you do. There's a saying that you can't get too much storage or bandwidth and I tend to agree with it. You never know when you might come into a situation where you need an extra 50 gigs of storage (need to backup flash drives, taking PC to a LAN party etc). If it was me I'd still partition the drive, but if you don't intend to store anything on it for any length of time then it doesn't matter as much...up to you :)

rayz said:
In regards to backup, I have not thought about that very much. It's definitely a concern and I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

It depends on your budget and how much you feel you want to backup. The cheapest and simplest solution would be just to have another drive in a USB2.0/FireWire external caddy. Caddies are pretty cheap ($20-40 generally) and obviously you'd need another drive for that. Requiring more backup capacity is one of the downsides to upgrading your main storage :)
 
thanks again amp.


this is probably a dumb question...

how do i make sure that my PC recognizes which drive is the correct boot drive?
 
rayz said:
thanks again amp.


this is probably a dumb question...

how do i make sure that my PC recognizes which drive is the correct boot drive?
Click to expand...

You need to check the boot device order in the BIOS. A typical boot order would be floppy drive first, DVD drive second and then the boot hard drive third. This means that the PC will look for bootable media first in the floppy drive, then in the DVD drive and if none is found in either of those it'll boot from the hard drive. To actually check this order you need to enter your computer's BIOS. You can do this at boot time, generally by holding the DEL key (if this doesn't work check your motherboard manual). Once there you're looking for a Boot or Boot Device menu (wording changes slightly from manufacturer to manufacturer). You can tell your drives apart by looking at the model number.
 
amp88 said:
You need to check the boot device order in the BIOS. A typical boot order would be floppy drive first, DVD drive second and then the boot hard drive third. This means that the PC will look for bootable media first in the floppy drive, then in the DVD drive and if none is found in either of those it'll boot from the hard drive. To actually check this order you need to enter your computer's BIOS. You can do this at boot time, generally by holding the DEL key (if this doesn't work check your motherboard manual). Once there you're looking for a Boot or Boot Device menu (wording changes slightly from manufacturer to manufacturer). You can tell your drives apart by looking at the model number.
Click to expand...

What he said, but in addition, if you are running more than 1 hard drive, there may be a separate setting for which hard drive is the one to boot from. Some Bioss let you select the hard drive in the boot order screen, some have a separate setting for which hard drive is the bootable one.

If you are going with 2 drives, you may want to consider the WD 640 Blue or Black drives for your OS drive. They are the current favorites around here for speed and value. Only a few bux more than the 500gig. No need for a smaller partition if you are going to keep your data on a separate drive anyway.

Don
 
DonDon said:
What he said, but in addition, if you are running more than 1 hard drive, there may be a separate setting for which hard drive is the one to boot from. Some Bioss let you select the hard drive in the boot order screen, some have a separate setting for which hard drive is the bootable one.

If you are going with 2 drives, you may want to consider the WD 640 Blue or Black drives for your OS drive. They are the current favorites around here for speed and value. Only a few bux more than the 500gig. No need for a smaller partition if you are going to keep your data on a separate drive anyway.

Don
Click to expand...

thank you!

i cannot seem to find the WB Caviar Black 640 on the egg. is this one the black?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218

i thought the WD Black 640gb had a 32mb cache?
 
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