Reuse 5 year old HDD in new build?

[Cs342]

So I have a 5+ year old Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm hard drive that I've been using as a secondary storage drive. I'm going to be building a new system and was wondering if it's a good idea to reuse it. This way, I can get a 1TB SSD and have this 1TB HDD as a secondary drive. Alternatively, I could get a 500GB SSD and buy a new 2TB HDD for a similar price. Which option makes more sense? I don't know if the drive will fail since it's already quite old, but I haven't had any issues so far.

[Alex Atkin UK]

If you are just using it for storing games or anything else you can easily replace if it fails, I'd go for it.  Anything important you REALLY should be keeping backups of anyway.

 

I only recently replaced my 2.5TB HDD with an SSD, its now in my NAS (its not a NAS rated drive) with 43192 hours on the clock.  Another drive in the NAS is on 47011 hours, although that one IS a NAS drive.

A newer model might be somewhat faster, but I actually found a CPU upgrade decreased loading times dramatically on its own.

I have a 500GB SSD in my gaming PC and greatly regret not getting bigger, as while I was fortunate enough to get a second 2TB recently, its going to be a PITA trying to upgrade that first one later as I'd have to remove that second one to clone it due to only two M.2 slots.

[SupaKomputa]

i have a 10 year old (almost) 512gb still working.

i say you get the 500+2tb+your old 1tb.

3 drive array would be lovely.

[Cs342]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

i have a 10 year old (almost) 512gb still working.

i say you get the 500+2tb+your old 1tb.

3 drive array would be lovely.

Wouldn't it be better to get a larger 1TB SSD though? I can always get more secondary storage but I'm not going to replace my OS drive once I build my new system

[Cs342]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

If you are just using it for storing games or anything else you can easily replace if it fails, I'd go for it.  Anything important you REALLY should be keeping backups of anyway.

 

I only recently replaced my 2.5TB HDD with an SSD, its now in my NAS (its not a NAS rated drive) with 43192 hours on the clock.  Another drive in the NAS is on 47011 hours, although that one IS a NAS drive.

A newer model might be somewhat faster, but I actually found a CPU upgrade decreased loading times dramatically on its own.

I have a 500GB SSD in my gaming PC and greatly regret not getting bigger, as while I was fortunate enough to get a second 2TB recently, its going to be a PITA trying to upgrade that first one later as I'd have to remove that second one to clone it due to only two M.2 slots.

Is 500GB not enough for Windows + programs + 1 or 2 games? I'd assume movies, music etc wouldn't see any benefit at all by being on a solid state drive

[SupaKomputa]

1 hour ago, Cs342 said:

Wouldn't it be better to get a larger 1TB SSD though? I can always get more secondary storage but I'm not going to replace my OS drive once I build my new system

i have 256gb right now. + 6tb array of new & old hdd.

no games & documents on the boot disk.

only program install and i still have 50gb left.

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, Cs342 said:

Is 500GB not enough for Windows + programs + 1 or 2 games? I'd assume movies, music etc wouldn't see any benefit at all by being on a solid state drive

Sure, but who want's only one or two games?  Plus larger SSDs are typically faster than smaller ones with higher IOPS.

 

Games are getting bigger (RDR2 anyone?) and with next-gen consoles making SSDs mandatory, its only a matter of time before running modern games off a HDD becomes problematic or even impossible.

 

While its not impossible to move games between drives, moving a 150GB game off the HDD onto the SSD and back again is going to get old FAST.  If only games were written to let you put the IO intensive data on SSD and the video files, less latency sensitive data on a HDD.  You'd kinda think Microsoft at least would have thought of that by now.

Like I said, the other problem is that if you later want to migrate to a bigger boot drive because you already filled all your M.2 slots, then migrating data across is a PITA.  If I had thought about it beforehand, I would have migrated my boot drive to the 2TB I put into the second M.2 slot, rather than simply used it for games.  Though granted its worse in my case because its an ITX build so I have to dismantle the whole PC to get to that slot which is underneath the motherboard.

[Cs342]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Sure, but who want's only one or two games?  Plus larger SSDs are typically faster than smaller ones with higher IOPS.

 

Games are getting bigger (RDR2 anyone?) and with next-gen consoles making SSDs mandatory, its only a matter of time before running modern games off a HDD becomes problematic or even impossible.

 

While its not impossible to move games between drives, moving a 150GB game off the HDD onto the SSD and back again is going to get old FAST.  If only games were written to let you put the IO intensive data on SSD and the video files, less latency sensitive data on a HDD.  You'd kinda think Microsoft at least would have thought of that by now.

Like I said, the other problem is that if you later want to migrate to a bigger boot drive because you already filled all your M.2 slots, then migrating data across is a PITA.  If I had thought about it beforehand, I would have migrated my boot drive to the 2TB I put into the second M.2 slot, rather than simply used it for games.  Though granted its worse in my case because its an ITX build so I have to dismantle the whole PC to get to that slot which is underneath the motherboard.

Hmmm that's interesting. Maybe I'll go for a 1TB SSD instead of 500GB then. If I move my current 1TB HDD over to my new system as a secondary drive, do I have to format it or can I just plug and play? That way I'll still have all my old files without needing to recover anything.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 10/27/2019 at 2:07 PM, Cs342 said:

Hmmm that's interesting. Maybe I'll go for a 1TB SSD instead of 500GB then. If I move my current 1TB HDD over to my new system as a secondary drive, do I have to format it or can I just plug and play? That way I'll still have all my old files without needing to recover anything.

Depends how you are using that 1TB drive right now.  If its the boot drive then it would be a PITA removing all the OS files, but if its currently just a storage drive then you can usually get away just plug and play.  The only trick is making sure Steam, UPlay, Origin, etc know where your games are on that drive.

With Steam you generally add the second drive as an installation location and then have to one by one install each game to that drive.  Each time it will "detect existing files" rather than downloading them.