Are Internal HDDs Plug and Play?

[XFA24]

So I was looking into buying a WDC Black 1tb HDD but I still want to keep my current 500gb hard drive

I was planning to make a fresh install of a windows 7 on the new hard drive and I would like to leave the old one as is(the files are still there but of course I will delete the OS files from the old hard drive)

Now my question is that does internal hard drives act like external hard drives?

Wherein you just connect it to the computer and there you go, it's already showing up and the files can be accessed on the my computer without formatting it

-thanks in advance!

 

[Samat]

Yes you can move harddrives between computers and they should work, windows will autodetect and install drivers if needed. Just have the computer powered off when removing or installing drives. When installing Windows on the new hard drive make sure to unplug the old hard drive for the duration of the install (also put the new hard drive to use the same sata port you now have your old drive plugged in to). After you are done installing you can plug in the old drive and it should work. For best results I would recommend moving all the files you need from the old drive to the new one and then removing all the partitions from the old drive and then formatting it (just make sure you are handling the correct drive when handling with partitions!). Otherwise there will most likely be leftovers from the old windows install that you can't get (easily) rid off.