hard drive advice

[guzler]

Well, this has come at a good time as I am looking to build a new computer, but just need to get it by the Mrs. The hard drive is sounding ropey at the moment, and I may need to do something sooner rather than later, so I want to buy a new HD to keep this rig going for now.

Can the contents of the hard drive be simply copied onto a new one and replaced or is there more to it than that ?

I guess if I did that, I would need to do the copying on a computer so the C drive wasn't in use ?

My idea is to connect a new one and a noisey one to my laptop and simply copy and paste. ???????

Any help appreciated guys, don't want to lose all my efforts in building my FSX setup.

[Quixoticish]

You can't just copy and paste from one hard drive to another and expect everything to work. If you're copying programs you might get away with it but a lot of registry entries will be missing so chances are you'll have to re-install anyway, and if you're talking about copying an operating system then it point blank won't happen.

If you invest in Acronis Trueimage or Norton Ghost I believe these can create a direct 1:1 copy of the hard drive that will boot fine and everything will work on it as it did on the old hard drive, however your mileage may vary.

[Lionheart]

Chris is on it.

When having a new HD installed in my Mac, they did a quick transfer from one to the other HD.

Some HD's, from what I hear, have software for copying files over, (transfers).

Make sure you get a HD that works with your present rig though, or you will need a jumper adapter that has a power supply and USB board/cord adapter. For instance, if your present MOBO uses PATA drives/links, and you are building a new rig, you will want to get a SATA drive, but that will not link with your rig, so you'll need to get a adapter kit so you can transfer everything over.

If you already have a SATA system in your rig, then just plug the new HD into the system, it should auto-sort the new HD as an additional drive, such as F drive, etc, and you can simply transfer everything over.


You are lucky... 1TB drives are down to $99.00 at NewEgg.com.....




Bill

[guzler]

Well having stripped it down, it the the cooler fan making the noise. I only bought it a couple of months ago from PC world. Panic over.

What is the benfit of buying large hard drives ? Even with FSX and loads of goodies installed on it, it's only using about 70gb space.

[harleyman]

I see no advantage to those big drives...They take forever to defrag if close to full too...They are however nice for storage and back-ups of the C/ Drive....

[arrowmaker]

I see no advantage to those big drives...They take forever to defrag if close to full too...They are however nice for storage and back-ups of the C/ Drive....

I agree with the point made about extra drives being useful for backups. I prefer not to be constantly burning dvd's so I have a couple of external HD's, a 3.5 750GB and a 2.5 250GB. As I tend not to keep the original exe. files on my 'C' drive (some of these exe's can be over 1GB in size) I find that duplicating some files, one on each external drive, makes sense. This is a lesson learnt through losing files in past HD failures.

[Lionheart]

I agree with the point made about extra drives being useful for backups. I prefer not to be constantly burning dvd's so I have a couple of external HD's, a 3.5 750GB and a 2.5 250GB. As I tend not to keep the original exe. files on my 'C' drive (some of these exe's can be over 1GB in size) I find that duplicating some files, one on each external drive, makes sense. This is a lesson learnt through losing files in past HD failures.

Words of wisdom.

Better to have too much space, then not enough.

Better to have another drive with backups then to lose everything that was on one drive.




If you only use about 70 Gigs, then you have no use for a 1TB drive. They do take ages to defrag and you would never use its capacity. People like me fill them up fast. I can use 2 or 3 of them. Others only need a 230 or 320 Gig drive and they have more then enough.

As Arrowmaker states, and its a fact, you can improve speeds at times by sharing drives. Also, having a backup drive to simply copy/paste folders too really helps as well. No CD's to continuously use up and take up room. I actually buy 'internal HD's' and run them in pods and a 'plug-in player' looking thing and use these drives for all file storage. Much quicker then using CD's, for me anyways.

(they kind of remind me at times of 8-track tape cartridges, lol.. I have 3 on my desk alone in a stack).




Bill