LangaList, March 13, 2006

Safely Adding Or Replacing A Hard Drive

Hard drives fill up, and eventually die: It's a fact of PC life. And while it's easy to add a new, empty drive to a PC as an adjunct to an existing, in-use drive, that's sometimes not really what you want: What's better is to add a new, fast, capacious drive, and move your data, intact, to it. This way, you can pick up more or less where you left off, and you don't have to rebuild or reinstall the operating system (unless you want to). If you keep the old, high-mileage drive in the system at all, it's just as extra space--- not as the main drive.

Because this is somewhat harder than just tossing a new drive in the PC, it's something many drive vendors gloss over; or acknowledge only with anemic tools that may or may not actually do the job.

But if you don't mind just a little geekiness--- just a little, honest!--- there are several allied tips and tricks that can give you enormous flexibility in adding or replacing a drive in a system. It's fast, fairly easy, and can save you many headaches in trying to retain as much of your original setup as possible. That's what we'll be covering today, in a new article posted now at http://www.informationweek.com/1080/langa.htm.

The information in this article stands on its own, but it also fits into a wider context: You can read it as-is, or think of it as "Part Two" of a three-part article. Please let me explain:

In a previous column, "Another Hidden Gem: The Windows Disk Management Tool" http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180207718 we looked at a little-known tool built into Windows for creating, formatting, or deleting partitions and drives; changing drive letter assignments and paths; and so on.

Today, we'll look at a slightly nonstandard way of physically adding a drive to an existing, in-use system--- a way I find much easier than the methods recommended by some drive manufacturers.

Although each of these first two columns stands alone, they also form the foundation for our upcoming discussion of an extremely low-cost terabyte server--- a PC that gives you a full 1,000 GB of network-sharable hard drive space in a fast, rock-solid system, and for only about $500!

But today, get that important second piece of the puzzle over at http://www.informationweek.com/1080/langa.htm. And then stay tuned!