Need Help Fixing or Upgrading old AMD System

[MrJak]

My girlfriend has an e9920y, with Windows 7 x64, and it's been having trouble since she got it (almost five years ago), and right now, we've determined that it is the hard drive, apparently it's a WD10EADS-65L5B1 -- any advice to fix it would be greatly appreciated, but we're planning on adding more hard drive space anyway, so we need some recommendations on what to get.

She needs between 2-4tb, and since this will be used for many things, such as gaming, video recording, editing, and general multi-tasking, she needs it to be fast and reliable, but also cheap(ish). The max budget for this may be around $160, and of course we want the best price per TB, but since this is going to be the main hard drive -- despite having a backup drive, reliability may be more important, so feel free to make multiple recommendations.

Also, we need to know if there's anyway to get hard drives over 2TB to boot with MBR -- I've read that MBR can do more than 2tb with 4k sectors, which we've found plenty with, on 64bit OSes, but I've never read that it'd work as a boot drive. Also, I've read that 4k sectors need to be supported by the chipset? This implies that not all do, so I need to know if this computer's motherboard, and its chipset (AMD 785G) can support either 4k sectors, and/or GPT booting, as I'm sure she wouldn't mind converting to GPT, if it makes it simpler -- I've heard it's easy, anyway.

Anyway, she wants to upgrade before Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel releases, so any help will be much appreciated.

 

[dariens007]

MBR was never conceived to handle 2tb+ boot drives, you gotta go gpt with uefi to boot that sucker or go through some funky workaround which isn't worth it because of the potential data loss. 785g is an old chipset so no uefi right? if you want to boot to a 4tb drive time for an upgrade. so you probably dont wanna upgrade to UEFI motherboard and it's risky to do the runaround cuz you can lose your data. get 2 of these have one for a boot drive and one for storage and call it a day?

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st2000dm001

what you think

 

[MrJak]

MBR was never conceived to handle 2tb+ boot drives, you gotta go gpt with uefi to boot that sucker or go through some funky workaround which isn't worth it because of the potential data loss. 785g is an old chipset so no uefi right? if you want to boot to a 4tb drive time for an upgrade. so you probably dont wanna upgrade to UEFI motherboard and it's risky to do the runaround cuz you can lose your data. get 2 of these have one for a boot drive and one for storage and call it a day?

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st2000dm001

what you think

We'd rather use as few hard drives as possible -- we'll be reusing the 1tb as a scratch drive, and recording, perhaps, so it doesn't need to be too reliable. We want to not use RAID, and we want to avoid extra partitions, but multiple partitions are preferable to multiple drives.

Also, I've heard some BIOSes can work with it, but it's a bit dicey, as I've heard those Seagates are, or at least the 3tb version?

 

[MrJak]

MBR was never conceived to handle 2tb+ boot drives, you gotta go gpt with uefi to boot that sucker or go through some funky workaround which isn't worth it because of the potential data loss. 785g is an old chipset so no uefi right? if you want to boot to a 4tb drive time for an upgrade. so you probably dont wanna upgrade to UEFI motherboard and it's risky to do the runaround cuz you can lose your data. get 2 of these have one for a boot drive and one for storage and call it a day?

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st2000dm001

what you think

Hold on, what's the "funky work around?"