HDD up-grade

What ho one and all,

I want to up-grade the storage capacity on my desktop. The computer is a old(ish) Dell running XP Pro. At the moment, I have a 500 Gb and 250 Gb hdd installed. However, I do have two 1TB external drives that I use for backing up my images.

The plan is to replace the 1TB external bu drives with 2TB and use the 1TB as internal hdd. All drives are 32 mb cache and SATA II.

New hdd all have a larger cache and seem to be SATA III. Will a SATA III fit in the SATA II desk caddy that I use? Will the difference between 32 v. 64 and II v. III mean that the new drives will not operate?

Thanks

Rex

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New hdd all have a larger cache and seem to be SATA III. Will a SATA III fit in the SATA II desk caddy that I use? Will the difference between 32 v. 64 and II v. III mean that the new drives will not operate?

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They are backward compatible, so that is no problem. I have a couple SATA III working in SATA I computers. SSD did require getting adapters as they are narrower. And they are thinner. Laptop size in other words.

You have a good plan.
I use SyncBackFree
https://www.2brightsparks.com/freewa...eware-hub.html

It works wonders for me. Even when dealing with 600+ GBs of data. Start it and let it run.

Thanks, good to know. I also use SynBack for backing-up the image files.

The plan is to take an image of the current OS, then copy everything from the existing external 1Tb back-up to the new external 2Tb back-up. Wipe the old 1hdd and using one of the partition tools, create the partitions. Drop it into the box as drive 0 and using the rescue disk, restore the image to the first partition.

The only flaw I can see is that in formatting and partitioning the old 1Tb hdd using an external hdd caddy, will I be creating drive letters beyond those I already have? Or is it that when a formatted and partitioned drive is Disk 0, the hardware automatically assumes that the first partition is C:?

At the moment, Disk 0 (500Gb) has six partitons (C,D, E,F,G,H) and the Disk 1 has three. (Don't think of asking why six partitions; I have my reason, however illogical!)

Finally, I currently have WD Green drives. Are the other colours (black, blue) better different or there is not much to choose?

Yes, you will most likely go beyond the drive letters you have now.
But they can be changed back with a bit of care.

The problem with “general rules” in the hardware space is that they lead buyers to believe there's a clear buying hierarchy without regard to use case scenarios. WD's general rule is Black > Blue > Green, but it's not always that simple – there are different use case scenarios attributed to each color, and “best” is classified more by the usage than by the color of the label on the drive chassis.

More http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/17...ive-for-gaming

For those those who don't read the link, the attachment came from there also.

Thanks very much; great information. Now I'm not sure about swapping the current 1Tb used for archival as Drive 0. Seems that it coulc be slower, although i don't know what WD hdd I currently have. disk info says WD-WCAYU- number but a Google search does not reveal much.

Searching for WD Blue, I see they are listed as 5400 rpm but your link suggests 7200 rpm. For the average home user, not playing games, does it make much difference (boot time/seek time/etc.?)

What about other makes, Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba? Same sort of colour coding? Any considered better than the other?

If this is going to be your boot drive, you have two things to consider: speed and reliability.

For reliability on a boot drive, I use either a Western Digital Black drive or a Seagate Enterprise drive, 7200 RPM or higher, with excellent reviews on NewEgg and other review sites.

For pure speed, an SSD would be fastest, but you would then store your data on a different drive, not just a different partition.

this is what I would recommend for a true screamer of a C drive
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...=N82E168202265

For about a 15 second bootup, SSD is the way to go.

Again, thanks.

Because I have an old(ish) Dell that was designed for XP. and although it will handle 64 bit, it only takes a max of 4Gb RAM. So whatever I do, won't be as good a spending a lot of dosh on a newer computer that will take a lot of RAM, new OS, etc. And I really don't need the extra speed as such.

So I think for now, two 2Tb hdd for external file storage and use the 1Tb to up-grade the existing internal hdd is my way forward.

I know that SDD will speed things u[ considerably, but since XP does not have TRIM, what is the benefit of an sdd with XP? As sdd should not be defragged, does that mean that with every delete command, the file is marked as deleted but the areas that it occupied are still 'filled' so that in time, the drive does actually fill up with deleted information?

Also, given that an sdd is not the same as an hdd, presumably, one can make and image of the OS on the sdd, store that on an hdd and restore it as usual?

I ran Win 10 BETA on a Dell Optiplex 755 with 2 GB or ram and a 120 GB SSD. Ran just fine, which surprised me as with Win 7 it fought to do anything it seemed. But you are right, and I forgot, XP is a different mess .

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I know that SDD will speed things u[ considerably, but since XP does not have TRIM, what is the benefit of an sdd with XP? As sdd should not be defragged, does that mean that with every delete command, the file is marked as deleted but the areas that it occupied are still 'filled' so that in time, the drive does actually fill up with deleted information?

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No different that regular hdds that you are using and all defrag does when it aligns stuff is it burys the stuff that occupied that point before. CCleaner does have a option for erasure of those , overwrite with 1's and 0's, points that are marked as deleted. Eraser does the same thing and I have used both, but it was about 4 years ago now that I last used them.

Now my Dell Optiplex 755 and my Dell Latitude D630, run Linux generally, a swap of SSD's , bootable thumbdrives with persistence allow me to use the thumbdrives on any computer that has USB listed in the one time selection list. And have my favorites, and any I want on it. Even have a 16 GB SD card set up with AntiX 16. By the way, I found for me old Win 98 had a bigger learning curve.
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