How to Update Your Computer With a New Disk
Discs fail. And no matter how many backups you have, losing a drive while you’re working on something important – my namesake’s law – can be a real headache. Fortunately, replacing your old and faulty drive with a new one is one of the easiest upgrades you can make.
Which drive should you choose?
You have many options depending on how much storage you can fit on your desktop or laptop, how many gigabytes or terabytes you need, and how much you are willing to spend. Here’s a rundown of the basics:
Solid state drive
Generally, if you’re looking for performance above all else, you can’t go wrong with a great solid state drive (SSD). SSDs are incredibly quiet, incredibly fast, and weigh almost nothing.
You will pay for these amenities: if you need a ton of space (say 2 TB), you will spend six to ten times more than a regular hard disk drive (HDD). If you’re considering an even faster M.2 SSD (which connects through your system’s faster PCI Express bus rather than your system’s slower SATA connections), be prepared to shell out even more – four digits in some cases.
Hybrid drive
The Hybrid Drive, or SSHD, tries to bridge the gap between slower hard drives and faster solid state drives. In fact, these are hard drives with a small amount of memory. The disk tries to shuffle the most frequently accessed data in the disk’s memory cache for faster access. Most of your data stays on the slower part of the hard drive.
Depending on how well the drive manages this process – this may take a while since the drive will not have any information about the frequently used data when you go to use it for the first time – you may see an increase in speed in certain cases.
SSHDs can be slightly more expensive than hard drives, but generally cost a lot less than comparable sized SSDs. You’re less likely to see massive capacity SSHDs (4TB +) compared to their hard drive counterparts, so if you need a ton of space you’ll have to make a choice (and we suspect you’ll go for a hard drive).
Hard drives
If solid state drives are a great place to store and hybrid drives are the superb fast food restaurant ( Cantina Bell ) or boutique boutique you love and no one knows about, hard drives are McDonald’s workhorse. They always exist, they work, they cost the least compared to anything else you can buy, and they will never go away. Never. (Or, at least, until the price of memory gets so low that a massive capacity solid state drive finally becomes a viable alternative. I won’t hold my breath.)
All hard drives perform differently, and there is one basic way to determine the speed of a drive when you look at its box: as a general rule, if you have two hard drives of the same size, one with a higher RPM (usually 7200) will outperform a disc with a higher rotation speed. lower revs (usually 5400).
Surface density also plays a role in disk performance, but if you’re obsessed with speeds enough to account for this measurement, it’s best to check out the benchmarks for the drives you’re considering. Most people should be fine buying the largest 7200 RPM drive that fits your budget.
I bought a disc. How do I install it?
I find buying a new drive for your system is the hardest part of the whole process. Once it’s out of the box and on your desk, it’s easy to set up.
For this demo, I am using my ( dust-free ) desktop computer. Installing a new drive on your laptop is even easier if your laptop manufacturer allows it. Typically, you’ll need to unscrew one panel, pop out the old drive and insert a new one, but you’ll want to check your laptop’s manual to make sure you’re doing it right.
(If you go this route, you will have to reinstall the operating system and applications, back up the software again and copy the data from where you previously saved it. My advice: create a disk image before replacing it, make a CD / DVD / USB recovery key and restore it as soon as you have a new drive.)
Step 1. Remove the new disc from the package
Carefully remove the new disc from its packaging, usually an anti-static bag. Resist the urge to rip the anti-static bag like a child on [a holiday of your choice]. I save them because they are great for storing old discs that you don’t know what to do with but don’t have the spirit to recycle them. Place the disc carefully in an antistatic bag and begin preparing your desktop system for installation. (This sounded much worse than I thought.)
Step 2. Open your desktop PC case.
You may need to break out a screwdriver; you could use your case’s thumb screws. Either way, remove both of its side panels or, if you’re lucky, one side panel. (My NZXT H440 chassis has easily accessible drive bays, all facing the same direction.)
This is where we can go our separate ways because each desktop is different. You can have slide-out drive trays or rails that you attach to each drive separately. You may even need to screw the drive directly into your chassis’s drive bay.
Regardless of how you install the new drive into the chassis, you want the old and new drives to be connected to your system at the same time so that it is easier for you to copy the contents of one drive to another. In my case, since I am using multiple drives, I unplugged one of my SSDs (not the one on which my Windows OS is installed) and used its power cable and SATA cable for my new drive – temporarily.
As an aside: Typically, your current drive (s) should already be plugged into the SATA ports on your motherboard. Your fastest drives should use your fastest SATA ports where possible, as indicated in your motherboard manual and sometimes on the motherboard itself. If you have an SSD, let it use your SATA 6Gb / s port (if applicable). Since a regular hard drive (like the one I bought) will never reach the speed of a SATA 3Gb / s port, the port you choose is less important.
With the new and old drives connected and ready to go, I launched my desktop, logged into Windows 10, and opened the Computer Management tool. I used this to initialize a new disk, create a new simple volume on its unallocated space (right click on the big black chunk of space in Computer Management) and assign a letter to the new volume.
If your old drive contains a lot of different content – photos, documents, movies, etc. – you can now copy its contents to the new drive using File Explorer. I find it easier to use a third party application like Macrium Reflect because it copies your files and then informs you of any annoying issues that pop up. With explorer, you might have to go back to your system and hit skip whenever it can’t copy any random .TMP file or some empty directory it can’t find (nor what you not needed on your new disk).
Macrium Reflect is also great if you want to make a direct clone of your old drive to a new drive – the perfect way to copy the entire contents of your single primary drive to the new one. When you do this, you will create an exact copy of the volumes on your old disk, including their size.
This is important to know because if you are cloning a small disk to a larger disk, you will need to go back to Computer Management when you are done to ensure that the cloned volume is taking up all of your disk space. If you’ve copied multiple volumes, it’s up to you how much space each should have.
After creating a perfect clone of the original disk on the new disk, shut down your computer. You will now want to go back to your case, disconnect and eject the original drive, disconnect the new drive, replace the original drive with the new drive, and reconnect the SATA and power cables to the new drive.
You can also unmount and remove the original drive, as long as you are using a single drive setup, and let the new drive sit right where you put it (assuming you installed it in your case, rather than roughly placing it on top of something another, like me).
Heck, you can even use both drives at the same time. Leave the SATA cable of each drive connected to the drive, but swap their connections on the motherboard. When performing a system backup, check Computer Management to make sure Windows is using your new drive as its primary drive, take a deep breath, and then format the old drive.
(Here’s a quick tip to make it easier to understand: before shutting down the system and swapping the SATA drive cables on the motherboard, place a large text file on the desktop of the old drive that says “OLD AND BORNED”. If you swap cables, boot into Windows , but this file is not present, you will find out that Windows uses your new disk as the main one.)
Adding, removing, and replacing storage is not the most difficult task, and there are many different storage configurations you can create when purchasing a new drive for your system. You are only limited by your imagination (and available space for additional drives). Even so, you can always get an external case or docking station if you’re running out of space on your system but want to save the drive for whatever reason. As I said, you always have options and it never hurts to have more storage space. Right?