Changing from 5600RPM HDD to 7200RPM HDD

[lukegadeke]

I have just purchased a 7200RPM HDD as I have had my old 5600RPM HDD for a very long time and figured an upgrade was needed as my other parts are being let down by a terrible HDD. (GTX 770, i7 4770k etc)

I was just wondering what is the best way to set-up a new HDD when I have all my stuff on this one. I want the 7200RPM HDD to run my OS obviously so things are slightly quicker (I know I won't see much difference.)

Should I just wipe my old HDD and do a new install of Windows on the new HDD, having my old HDD as extra space but nothing else, or is there a way to drag everything over to my new HDD, as if nothing had changed. (I'm guessing there isn't a way and if there was it would take a while).

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Luke.

 

[MeteorsRaining]

Instead of getting a whole new HDD, I'd rather get a 120 GB SSD exclusively for Windows and programs.
Your rig, as you mentioned, has very good specs so you shouldn't mind spending ~$80-100 on a 120 GB SSD for that purpose. There's no reason in upgrading from 5600 to 7200 as long as you use HDD to boot, the result might a second or 2 faster but not more.

My suggestion would be to consider buying new HDD only if your present one can't read DATA (not to be confused with programs and OS), like videos, documents, audio, etc properly and stutters in that too.
If you have issues in booting and running programs, SSD might just be the solution.

And if you definitely need to buy a HDD, then yes you need to install the OS again on the new HDD, also, DO NOT COPY PASTE OS FILES. As for your data, you may need to manually Copy-paste or use a software for this task, read more here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/158765/copy_old_drive.html

To be clear,
Data here means documents, music, videos, files and media-which do not process other files.
Programs here mean OS, programs which do process files.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You can always clone the old HDD to the new one, then swap out the drive and make sure it works properly. You can then format the old drive and use it as secondary storage. There are a lot of free cloneing utilities out there and some drive manufacturer's even have their own cloning tool available for free.