Upgrading Secondary HDD Capacity

[Jerrett]

Long time lurker of Tom's Hardware, and I apologize if this has been solved elsewhere. I tried searching but couldn't find anything that really matched my situation exactly and I am hoping for some confirmation or "No don't do that!" kind of help/answers.

I'll start with my current setup as it will help with explaining things:

OS: Windows 10
SSD 1 (C: ) - 120GB capacity, primary drive, OS installed, very few programs.
HDD 2 (D: ) - 1TB capacity, only used for installing games (Steam, Origin, Blizzard, etc.)
HDD 3 (E: ) - 500GB capacity, only used for files, but I changed the "Downloads" and "Documents" directories to be located on this drive.
HDD 4 (F: ) - 500GB capacity, used for media files, again I changed the "Videos", "Music" and "Pictures" directories to be located on this drive.

What I am planning on doing is upgrading (F: ) to a 4TB HDD. Normally I would just drag+drop to the new drive, but I don't want to mess up the "Videos", "Music" and "Pictures" directories with Windows. So I was planning to connect the new 4TB drive externally, copy+paste everything from (F: ) to the external which will have some random assignment like (K: ). Open disk Management and change (F: ) to (Z: ) and change (K: ) to (F: ). Power off, open up the case, pull out the 500GB drive, plug in the new 4TB, close up the case and power on. My theory is that everything will work the same, my fear is that changing the current (F: ) to something else will also affect the "Videos", "Music" and "Pictures" directories and they won't associate with the new 4TB drive when it is reassigned to (F: ).

Should I migrate the "Videos", "Music" and "Pictures" directories to the 4TB drive while it is plugged in externally then change drive letters? I messed up the "Videos" directory once when I first moved its location to (F: ) and it didn't properly associate with video files or the correct folder location. I had to actually re-install Windows to get it to work correctly, and I would like to avoid that hassle again.

Thank you in advance for your help, suggestions and comments.

 

[Barty1884]

Once you move your "videos" etc from F to K, and reassign the drive letter, there's a good chance F/Windows will follow the drive mapping and then look for K/Windows - despite you moving everything to the "new" F.

Just worry about moving the files over to the new drive, then remap the directory to ensure its 's looking in the correct place.

**Alternatively, you could clone the 500GB drive to the new 4TB drive, then disconnect the 500GB temporarily. Expand the partition from the 500GB you cloned to the full 4TB and ensure it's assigned drive letter F.

Then reconnect the 500GB (by this point, probably automatically called "G") and format it.