3TB upgrade on a Inspiron 580 i5-750

sudhan_venkat

Honorable
Jun 27, 2012
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10,510
Hi,

I have a Dell Inspiron 580 series of Desktop which came preloaded with
- Intel® Core™ i5-750 Processor (2.66GHz, 1333MHz F 1 SB, 8MB Cache)
- 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2x2GB)
- 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
- Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit (English)

Few months back, I upgraded my computer with a 1TB harddisk in the second slot provided, now I want to upgrade it with another 3TB internal harddisk as there is a 3rd provision of the SATA on the motherboard though the provisioning is not there in the cabinet but will somehow figure a way out for that.

But my question is will this machine be able to run a 3TB harddisk as a 3rd drive or even as a 2nd drive [as I am ready to swap the already existing 1TB harddisk if the 3rd drive idea does not click].

Plan 1
Drive 1 - 500 GB [Boot Drive]
Drive 2 - 1 TB [Data Drive]
Drive 3 - 3 TB [Data Drive]

Plan 2
Drive 1 - 500 GB [Boot Drive]
Drive 2 - 3 TB [Data Drive]

I tired to call the Dell customer care, one executive says that the machine can support only upto 1 TB of harddisk [which i found it lously as my machine already is running a 1.5TB], spoke to another executive he said it will support upto 2/ 2.5 TB but not 3TB.

Can some one help me out !!!!

Regards
Sudhan
 
Yes, your computer should be able to handle a 3 TB hard disk. Here is what I recommend doing:

1) make sure your motherboard has the latest bios from dell
2) temporarily install the 3TB drive on the 3rd SATA Port.
3) after windows boots up, use the Disk Manager to create a new NTFS partition on the 3TB drive
4) copy or move all the data from your 1TB drive to the 3TB drive, then remove the 3TB drive from your system.
5) use Clonezilla to clone your 500G drive onto your 1TB drive. Remove the 500 gig drive from your system.
6) move the 1TB drive into the first SATA port that your 500G drive used to be in.
7) install the 3TB drive into 2nd SATA port that the 1TB used to occupy.

there you go. all done.