Adding Additional Hard Drive

[abcarr]

I finally got my computer up and running again after doing a complete/clean reinstall of Windows 7 due to the Task Scheduler being "corrupt" and not working which in turn caused my hard drive to fill up.

Everything is running fine now with no issues, but after doing the clean reinstall I pulled up the properties for my computer and found that with just Windows 7 and a few of other programs installed, the hard drive is nearly at half capacity already. I've only got a 80GB hard drive and it says I've got a little over 40GB of available space.

So here's what I'm thinking of doing. Buying and installing a 500GB hard drive, cloning the existing hard drive to the new one and then make the new, larger capacity hard drive the main one, keeping the original, smaller one as back up and for additional storage.

Does this make sense? And how hard is it to clone (if that's the right word??) the old hard drive to the new one? Is that something an "Install Wizard" will walk me through? And once it's done, will I be able to assign the new hard drive as the main one? And lastly, what is the better, more reliable of brand of hard drive to go with? I've read good things about both HGST and Western Digital. And the 80GB that is in the computer now is a Western Digital, so does it matter if you mix brands?




Thanks!!!

 

[Rocky Bennett]

Use Space Sniffer to find out what is really taking the space on your hard drive.


http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there abcarr,

Yeah, that makes sense. The cloning process would create exactly the same copy of your current drive and place it onto the bigger one. Once you do that, you can take the old drive out of the system and put the new one onto it's place. If your system works just fine, you can attach the old one and reformat it, so you can use it for additional storage.
If your new drive has 80 GB of storage space after the cloning process, you can go to Disk Management and see if there's some unallocated space. If this is the case, then you can either extend the existing partition or create a new one.

As for the cloning, you can use Acronis True Image WD edition. You can find the tool in WD's website under the downloads section.

I can't really comment on other HDD brands except for WD. You can't really know how long your HDD will last. So, you should always have a back up of your data. One thing you can take a look at is the warranty period.
No, it doesn't really matter if you mix brands.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD