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Hard drives

DeckOfSpades
By DeckOfSpades
in Storage Devices
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I have a question, would it be safe to in stall an older hard drive in my PC, about 6-7 years olf, that already has a copy of windows 10 on it and use it as an extra drive for games and stuff? or could it interfear with my current drive because it has it's own copy of Windows 10?

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3 minutes ago, DeckOfSpades said:

r could it interfear with my current drive because it has it's own copy of Windows 10?

Why don't you just format the old drive? But no, it should not interfere with anything.

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If it has an OS installed to it, your computer might try to boot from it which likely won't work. Generally you can prevent that by plugging the new drive into a higher numbered sata port and by plugging the drive which you wish to boot from into "sata0" which should be written on the board, sometimes it's confusing which is sata0 in a stacked connector but bios will tell you somewhere.

 

If you right click the windows start menu, you should have an option for Disk Management. You can format disks in there, it's been a long while since I've messed with used drives like that in windows but if aren't currently booted to a drive you should be able to reformat it however you want.

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40 minutes ago, Slayer3032 said:

If it has an OS installed to it, your computer might try to boot from it which likely won't work. Generally you can prevent that by plugging the new drive into a higher numbered sata port and by plugging the drive which you wish to boot from into "sata0" which should be written on the board, sometimes it's confusing which is sata0 in a stacked connector but bios will tell you somewhere.

 

If you right click the windows start menu, you should have an option for Disk Management. You can format disks in there, it's been a long while since I've messed with used drives like that in windows but if aren't currently booted to a drive you should be able to reformat it however you want.

Sooo, if "format" is grayed out it's the one that I booted from?

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given it is 6 years old replace it it. it likely is coming towards the end of its life. I don't trust HDD older than 10.

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3 hours ago, DeckOfSpades said:

Sooo, if "format" is grayed out it's the one that I booted from?

I'm not using windows right now so I can't tell you for sure but I would assume, yes. It should show you which partitions are mounted, so like your C drive partition would have a (C:) next to it. You would not want to touch your primary drive which you're running from. Windows doesn't let you format mounted partitions if I recall anyways so if it's getting mounted as a (D:) drive I imagine it would be greyed out as well.

 

11 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

given it is 6 years old replace it it. it likely is coming towards the end of its life. I don't trust HDD older than 10.

You would replace a drive that was no longer being used that you simply wanted to toss in another build for some extra storage just because it was old?

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1 minute ago, Slayer3032 said:

You would replace a drive that was no longer being used that you simply wanted to toss in another build for some extra storage just because it was old?

it matters what gets stored, games that have saved files back up to the clouds sure that would be fine but anything without a near real time backup I wouldn't put on it.

Good luck, Have fun, Build PC, and have a Wii and PS2 as your only consoles.

NightHawk 3.0: R7 5700x @, B550A vision D, H105, 2x32gb Oloy 3600, Asrock RX9070xt Steel Legends, Corsair RM750X, 500gb 850 evo, 2tb rocket and 5tb Toshiba x300, 3x 6TB WD Black W10 all in a Obsidian 750D airflow.
GF PC: (NightHawk 2.0): R7 2700x, B450m vision D, 4x8gb Geli 2933, Sapphire RX 6700XT  Nitro+, CX650M RGB, Obsidian 350D

Skunkworks: R5 3500U, 16gb, 500gb 860 evo, Vega 8. HP probook G455R G6 Ubuntu 20. LTS

Condor (MC server): 6600K, z170m plus, 16gb corsair vengeance LPX, samsung 750 evo, EVGA BR 450.

Spirt  (NAS) ASUS Z9PR-D12, 2x E5 2620V2, 8x4gb, 24 3tb HDD. F80 800gb cache, trueNAS, 2x12disk raid Z3 stripped

HP probook 445R G6 review

 

"Stupidity is like trying to find a limit of a constant. You are never truly smart in something, just less stupid."

Camera Gear: X-S10, 16-80 F4, 35mm F1.4, Helios 44

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2 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

given it is 6 years old replace it it. it likely is coming towards the end of its life. I don't trust HDD older than 10.

I use 10+ years old hard drives all the time, but then again they're only really that old because they were collecting dust for me.

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