Adding another hard drive question.

[im1knight]

Hi there, my hard drive is really running out of space, i currently have 2 360GB seagate hard drive, with only 8MB cache each, and cannot be put into a RAID 0.. <_< so althrough it's 7200RPM, it's really slow when loading stuff

But my space is running out too, 720GB is just simply not enough to hold all my stuff. I'm thinking of adding another 1TB to it. So i looked and decided on a Western Digital 1TB. Which is the Western Digital Caviar Black. I heard it's fast and reliable.

 

However my question is, can i put a western digital hard drive in with seagate ones without causing any problems? I cannot remove the original 720GB because then the storage would still not be enough..

Normally people just go for one brand only, but i heard seagate's 1TB hard drive got a lot of bad reviews...with crashes and firmware issues etc, and is not as fast and the Caviar Black...

So..any ideas?

 

Thanks!

[Laura]

Yes, you can add any number of HDDs/SSDs from any number of manufacturers so long as you have the ports to hold them. So in your case, if you went with the Western Digital HDD with the two Seagate drives still installed, you should not have a problem.

[im1knight]

Yes, you can add any number of HDDs/SSDs from any number of manufacturers so long as you have the ports to hold them. So in your case, if you went with the Western Digital HDD with the two Seagate drives still installed, you should not have a problem.

 

oh cool.

i'm asking this because i remembered when i plugged a western digital 400GB in to recovery data(the OS on that hard drive is messed up), my computer starts to respond real slowly etc..and the drive won't show up. But maybe that's just the drive's problem.

[Laura]

Yes, you can add any number of HDDs/SSDs from any number of manufacturers so long as you have the ports to hold them. So in your case, if you went with the Western Digital HDD with the two Seagate drives still installed, you should not have a problem.

 

oh cool.

i'm asking this because i remembered when i plugged a western digital 400GB in to recovery data(the OS on that hard drive is messed up), my computer starts to respond real slowly etc..and the drive won't show up. But maybe that's just the drive's problem.

If it is not the primary drive you are installing, I believe that you have to initialize and format the drive before it becomes usable. Though, I am not sure if you did this or not. Did you want to correct the problem you just mentioned, with the drive not being recognized?

[Will H]

In terms of compatibility, JBOD (basically what you're doing) is relatively nice and flexible. Even if you can't go for a RAID array, you can put in as many drives as you like so long as you can plug in a power cable and data cable to every one. The disadvantage is that the speed increase will be negligable and it will pretty much run at the speed of the slowest drive. Go for reliability for your new drive, but not for speed.

[im1knight]

Yes, you can add any number of HDDs/SSDs from any number of manufacturers so long as you have the ports to hold them. So in your case, if you went with the Western Digital HDD with the two Seagate drives still installed, you should not have a problem.

 

oh cool.

i'm asking this because i remembered when i plugged a western digital 400GB in to recovery data(the OS on that hard drive is messed up), my computer starts to respond real slowly etc..and the drive won't show up. But maybe that's just the drive's problem.

If it is not the primary drive you are installing, I believe that you have to initialize and format the drive before it becomes usable. Though, I am not sure if you did this or not. Did you want to correct the problem you just mentioned, with the drive not being recognized?

 

Oh, i will put the new drive as the primary drive this time for sure. When i was doing that i did not. ok, now i know what's wrong.

 

 

In terms of compatibility, JBOD (basically what you're doing) is relatively nice and flexible. Even if you can't go for a RAID array, you can put in as many drives as you like so long as you can plug in a power cable and data cable to every one. The disadvantage is that the speed increase will be negligable and it will pretty much run at the speed of the slowest drive. Go for reliability for your new drive, but not for speed.

 

By speed do you mean by their RPM or their cache etc..? Cuz they are both 7200RPM, it's just the caviar black have 32MB cache and 2processors which makes it faster...(Read around 115MB/sec, right now my drive read is around 77.8MB/sec). so you are saying the extra cache and processor won't be used..? or did you mean by the RPM of the drive..?

[Laura]

Oh, i will put the new drive as the primary drive this time for sure. When i was doing that i did not. ok, now i know what's wrong.

You would have to reinstall your operating system on the drive that you want to be primary, which is, in its own, a way of formatting the drive. So unless you just want the bigger drive to have the OS on it, you could just add it as a second or third drive and format it through Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management. There you will see a column with all partitions of your system, including installed HDDs and you can format the unusable drive.

 

Here's a link to a site with the specific of how to format a new drive on Windows XP. The process should be similar for Vista, but I haven't tried formatting for Windows 7.

Edited December 12, 2009 by laura0077
Included link.

[Will H]

In terms of compatibility, JBOD (basically what you're doing) is relatively nice and flexible. Even if you can't go for a RAID array, you can put in as many drives as you like so long as you can plug in a power cable and data cable to every one. The disadvantage is that the speed increase will be negligable and it will pretty much run at the speed of the slowest drive. Go for reliability for your new drive, but not for speed.

 

By speed do you mean by their RPM or their cache etc..? Cuz they are both 7200RPM, it's just the caviar black have 32MB cache and 2processors which makes it faster...(Read around 115MB/sec, right now my drive read is around 77.8MB/sec). so you are saying the extra cache and processor won't be used..? or did you mean by the RPM of the drive..?

 

Read and write speed will be at the lowest speed, so yes, there's going to be some processing power that's not used. That's why it's ideal to have similar hard drives, but not necessary.

[Ember]

.

[Laura]

Most hard drives come with a single large partition containing a vfat filesystem, so while it may be better to reformat with a more robust filesystem (probably NTFS on a recent Windows-based system), it isn't generally necessary.

If it's showing up in BIOS but not in My Computer you have to initialize it. Is there an alternative method?

[Sbrideau]

I have a 1TB hard drive that I made multiple pratitions with the NTFS filesystem, so I suggest you do the same, or if you want, still a single partition.

 

To initialize it, you can go to the disk management that's built in Windows, to do so, press the win key + R then in the run box that appears, type "diskmgmt.msc" without the quotes, you should be able to see your unallocated hard drive there.

 

One thing though, if your computer slows down upon adding a hard drive, it might be the PSU that's not strong enough to add something to that computer, might I ask, is this a costum or prebuilt computer? Saying that by experience since when I temporarly put my old PSU back in my computer, it was strong enough but ran very slow because of the bad PSU.

[im1knight]

In terms of compatibility, JBOD (basically what you're doing) is relatively nice and flexible. Even if you can't go for a RAID array, you can put in as many drives as you like so long as you can plug in a power cable and data cable to every one. The disadvantage is that the speed increase will be negligable and it will pretty much run at the speed of the slowest drive. Go for reliability for your new drive, but not for speed.

 

By speed do you mean by their RPM or their cache etc..? Cuz they are both 7200RPM, it's just the caviar black have 32MB cache and 2processors which makes it faster...(Read around 115MB/sec, right now my drive read is around 77.8MB/sec). so you are saying the extra cache and processor won't be used..? or did you mean by the RPM of the drive..?

 

Read and write speed will be at the lowest speed, so yes, there's going to be some processing power that's not used. That's why it's ideal to have similar hard drives, but not necessary.

 

Hmm...but i thought JBOD is referring to when you combine multiple drives into one large logical volume...? But i'm not planning on doing that whatsoever...They will be running as completely independent drives(Each HD is divided into multiple partitions, like how i'm using my 2 HDs atm)..

 

So I don't think the drive speed will be effected if they are running independently...? Since they are not RAM sticks..

 

I'm i wrong or did you read my question wrong..?

 

Just want to make sure. Cuz it's not making a lot sense to me atm..

 

Thank you for clearing thing up for me

 

I have a 1TB hard drive that I made multiple pratitions with the NTFS filesystem, so I suggest you do the same, or if you want, still a single partition.

 

To initialize it, you can go to the disk management that's built in Windows, to do so, press the win key + R then in the run box that appears, type "diskmgmt.msc" without the quotes, you should be able to see your unallocated hard drive there.

 

One thing though, if your computer slows down upon adding a hard drive, it might be the PSU that's not strong enough to add something to that computer, might I ask, is this a costum or prebuilt computer? Saying that by experience since when I temporarly put my old PSU back in my computer, it was strong enough but ran very slow because of the bad PSU.

 

Yea i'll be dividing it into multiple partitions for sure. The computer itself is a prebuild, however i have upgraded the PSU and graphics card for it already, so i don't think the PSU is going to be an issue.

I'll try that tip when i get my hard drive.

[Will H]

In terms of compatibility, JBOD (basically what you're doing) is relatively nice and flexible. Even if you can't go for a RAID array, you can put in as many drives as you like so long as you can plug in a power cable and data cable to every one. The disadvantage is that the speed increase will be negligable and it will pretty much run at the speed of the slowest drive. Go for reliability for your new drive, but not for speed.

 

By speed do you mean by their RPM or their cache etc..? Cuz they are both 7200RPM, it's just the caviar black have 32MB cache and 2processors which makes it faster...(Read around 115MB/sec, right now my drive read is around 77.8MB/sec). so you are saying the extra cache and processor won't be used..? or did you mean by the RPM of the drive..?

 

Read and write speed will be at the lowest speed, so yes, there's going to be some processing power that's not used. That's why it's ideal to have similar hard drives, but not necessary.

 

Hmm...but i thought JBOD is referring to when you combine multiple drives into one large logical volume...? But i'm not planning on doing that whatsoever...They will be running as completely independent drives(Each HD is divided into multiple partitions, like how i'm using my 2 HDs atm)..

 

So I don't think the drive speed will be effected if they are running independently...? Since they are not RAM sticks..

 

I'm i wrong or did you read my question wrong..?

 

Just want to make sure. Cuz it's not making a lot sense to me atm..

 

Thank you for clearing thing up for me

 

Oh, I think I've read your question wrong then. I thought you were making a single logical drive out of them. Yeah, if you're using multiple partitions then files contained within the new drive will load faster than files within the old drive, so performance will vary on the program/file you're running.

[im1knight]

In terms of compatibility, JBOD (basically what you're doing) is relatively nice and flexible. Even if you can't go for a RAID array, you can put in as many drives as you like so long as you can plug in a power cable and data cable to every one. The disadvantage is that the speed increase will be negligable and it will pretty much run at the speed of the slowest drive. Go for reliability for your new drive, but not for speed.

 

By speed do you mean by their RPM or their cache etc..? Cuz they are both 7200RPM, it's just the caviar black have 32MB cache and 2processors which makes it faster...(Read around 115MB/sec, right now my drive read is around 77.8MB/sec). so you are saying the extra cache and processor won't be used..? or did you mean by the RPM of the drive..?

 

Read and write speed will be at the lowest speed, so yes, there's going to be some processing power that's not used. That's why it's ideal to have similar hard drives, but not necessary.

 

Hmm...but i thought JBOD is referring to when you combine multiple drives into one large logical volume...? But i'm not planning on doing that whatsoever...They will be running as completely independent drives(Each HD is divided into multiple partitions, like how i'm using my 2 HDs atm)..

 

So I don't think the drive speed will be effected if they are running independently...? Since they are not RAM sticks..

 

I'm i wrong or did you read my question wrong..?

 

Just want to make sure. Cuz it's not making a lot sense to me atm..

 

Thank you for clearing thing up for me

 

Oh, I think I've read your question wrong then. I thought you were making a single logical drive out of them. Yeah, if you're using multiple partitions then files contained within the new drive will load faster than files within the old drive, so performance will vary on the program/file you're running.

 

 

Ok, I got it. thank you for the help