Improve Your Storage

Storage is constant concern with any system. If you are 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, here we have some 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 an then install and reconnect the new one in its place. If you’re a newbie, the only truly difficult part is making sure all the data is copied over, so use a transfer utility such a ‘Windows Easy Transfer’ to ensure that it’s been done properly.

Mounting the new operational drive doesn’t require a huge amount of thought. It’s good to leave a fair amount of space around the drive to minimize heat retention, but it’s incredibly rare to hard drives to be negatively affected by heat buildup, 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 (usually you have to press F2 or Del key when you hear the post beep to get to that point) and find the STA settings. Usually, this 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 double check that data and power connectors. Unless something is faulty, it should be visible in the BIOS. You want to try using different STA posts and cables to check. As a last resort, swap the STA power and data cables out of your working drive and into the new one. If it still doesn’t work, it’s likely something serous is wrong with drive.

If the drive appears in BIOS but not in 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 the 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, that if your old hard drive is still in a usable condition, it doesn’t make and 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 form. 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 a SSD, and your computer will boot faster and run more smoothly. I 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) and SSD, but if you have two mechanical drives to pick between, then you have to consider 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, which speed as your secondary concern: a five year old drive is probably too old to truck 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 common, 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, you’ll need to manually sort through the files and delete the ones 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.

Using a Second Drive in RAID

If you have two mechanical hard drives with the same capacity, the simply thing to do is to run them alongside one another. But the smart thing to do is set them up in a RAID array. RAID stands for ‘Redundant Array of Independent Disks’ and means that multiple drive units are being run together as a single unit. Depending on the type of RAID array you run, you can either vastly increase access speeds or vastly improve data integrity.

Before you embark on a RAID setup, it’s worth bearing in mind that RAID isn’t necessarily intended as a home-user technology. While you will benefit from having a RAID array in your desktop system, its strengths are amplified in the context of multiple users accessing a single disk array and in situations where data integrity is critical. That doesn’t stop you setting one up for your own use, of course, but it does mean that it’s more of a fun project than a practical necessity.

There are multiple ways to implement a RAID array, using varying amounts of drives for varying purposes, but most are either deprecated or aimed purely at high-end enterprise use. Instead, you will probably set up either a RAID-0 or RAID-1 array.

RAID-0 uses disk striping to share the read/ write load over multiple drives. Unlike most versions of RAID, it has no built-in redundancy, but it does allow you to access the combined capacity of the arrayed drives (so two 1TB drives would give you 2TB of usable space, rather than 1TB) while still receiving the speed benefits of RAID’s simultaneous read/ write capabilities.

The flip side of this is that there is no built-in fault tolerance, so your data is no safer than on one individual hard drive, and indeed, much less safe. If one drive spontaneously fails you will lose half of all of your data, leaving the other half unusable. It would be like ripping half of the pages out of a book. The remaining half would also be unusable. Keep this in mind if you are thinking of running an old and new drive together. RAID-0 reliability is only as good as the worst drive, so it is best done with pairs of new drives.

The alternative and better option if you are running an old drive with a new drive is RAID.1. Also called ‘disk mirroring’, it has no striping and simply duplicates read/ write actions across drives. The redundancy can sometimes speed up reading data if the controller supports duplex read, but writing data doesn’t have the same advantage, disk write performance for RAID-1 is the same as for single-disk setups. This type of RAID is best for situations where multiple users are accessing the same data, and it is known for providing the best fault tolerance of any RAID setup. If one drive fails, you can simply continue as normal using the mirrored copy until the broken unit is replaced.

It is also possible to combine RAID-0 and RAID-1 into RAID-10 (sometimes called RAID 1+0). This form required four drives and stripes data across two pairs of mirrored drives, ensuring maximum speed and robust redundancy, although at quadruple the cost of single drive, it is often too expensive to be worth using, particularly in home environment!

It is worth noting that running SSDs (Solid State Drive) in RAID is not really worth doing. One of the main reasons RAID configurations increase access times is because mechanical hard drives are, quite simply, slower at shifting data than almost every other component in a computer. When it comes to SSD drives, the principle may be the same, but SSD drives are already so fast that the benefit is much lower. Indeed, if you try to stripe more than four SSDs, you will probably end up slowing access times down!

One of the downsides of stripping SSDs is that SSD drives are still comparatively expensive, especially at the lower end of the market where the initial manufacturing cost makes up a large part of the price. RAID was originally created to avoid the premium on larger hard drives, but buying two small SSDs is invariably more expensive than buying a single unit of equal capacity, regardless of what level of the market you look at. And while paying more for two SSDs will give you extra speed over a single drive, it also halves reliability, so the economics are not particularly smart.