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.
