Filled up my HDD need a new one and have a few questions

[neal0790]

So i built my rig back in December and have been using my 1TB Seagate http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148697 HDD for about 7 months now. Well it looks likes its time to purchase another HDD since i have something like 40GB left on the Drive. Most of its all games/mods/music and i could uninstall a few games i dont really play anymore but i have attachment to all of them and its hard to uninstall anything. So i think i should just grab another HDD.

I was just going to purchase an identical drive, but came across this at microcenter for $109 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148910&Tpk=STBD2000101 Its only $10 more and its 2TB. From the specs it looks like it still has all the same specs of the one i have with just the benefit of an extra TB. Not that many reviews or anything but looks like a great deal.

Now i do have a few questions.....
First is most of my HDD is filled with games, whether it be steam/origin/gamestop/amazon etc..If i were to get this 2TB drive i would rather have all that stuff on my 2TB drive and use the 1TB for music/videos/random crap and a recording drive. Just seems alot easier and i can still keep all my games and have room to add plenty more. Is that an easy task to do? Or would it screw everything up, like shortcuts on my desktop, game saves, etc.

I have an SSD for my boot drive so i dont need to worry about windows and all that. Its just i would need to move like 900GB of stuff over to the new drive. Whats the easiest way to do this if it can be done. Or would i pretty much have to just uninstall all my games and download them again? Another thing is im sure this isnt a quick process to do, anyone ever done something like this? how long do you think it would take?

Thanks to anyone who can help me out here and give me a good idea on what to do.

Selling the monitors in my MOD RIGS - http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1653897

 

[nhasian]

Clonezilla is a Free & Open Source Software for Disk Imaging and Cloning. You can make a Full System Backup or transfer the entire contents of one drive to another if you are doing a Hard drive upgrade.

How to use Clonezilla Step By Step instructions with pictures!

 

[geofelt]

The easiest will be to use a cloning program. Acronis true image makes one.
You can download a 30 day trial license for free and use that. They hope you will like it enough to buy the program.
It really is a good program and well worth buying.

 

[neal0790]

Hey thanks for the answer. My steam collection just seems to keep growing and growing and 70% of whats on my HDD is steam and with the new games i bought i dont even have any room to download them. If i were to just move them over to the new HDD would it just be a simple copy and paste job or would that program be able to just do that too. If its just a simple copy and paste do i just have to copy the steam/origin/gamestop folder along with the app for each onto the new drive and it should work? Im planing on leaving most of the other programs on my drive so the 2TB one would just be a straight game drive. So atleast if it did fail say 3 months down the road all i would loose is games which can be easily downloaded it again. The only thing that worries me are the game save folder that are on my SSD still going to work?

 

[nhasian]

yes you can simply copy and paste but your games work work unless you also change the drive letter to match the original one. for example if your SSD is C:, and your existing 1 TB drive is D: and you install the new 2TB drive as E:, then after you copy your data over you will need to make the new drive D: for your games to continue to work.