Upgrading the hard drives: Going from 750gb to 6tb

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(Edited)

When I built this computer a few years back I was worried 750GB drives would not be enough. And just as I thought they became an issue as I started depending on them more. I decided to upgrade them and add about 10x more capacity.

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I've been playing musical chairs with my data, moving them off the PC onto an external drive but I'm really getting tired of looking for data all over the place.

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The 750gb disks are still good, no errors. Just a little too small for my needs at this point. I almost deleted some unpublished Mason Bee footage while trying to clear up space so I figured I really need to stop playing around and just upgrade

A few years back these 6tb drives would have been pretty expensive. Now a days they are about $150 each. I got two of them so I can run a RAID 1 and mirror them. This way if a drive fails I'll still have a copy of the data on the other drive.

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Taking the old drives out was easy using a tool-less system. Though I had to move the drives over to the new enclosures which I needed a screw driver for.

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Got them in and hooked up the sata cables and power cables.

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I hooked the computer up to the monitor keyboard and mouse and got about to booting up. I needed to initialize the new disks and form them into a RAID. That's a term when you take multiple disks but make them look like a single disk to the operating system. There are many configs, different ones for different needs.

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After inputting the values I needed to save. And that became a problem, my f10 key was not working...

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Dont mind the worn off keys. I know where they are in my head. But for whatever reason I could not get the f10 key to work.

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I had to find another keyboard and plug it in just to press f10.. hah I never seem to see these issues coming.

After that it was smooth sailing, I put my PC back in its spot in the desk. I booted up and formatted the RAID-1 in the OS. Took about 6 hours to move my data back on the machine. Was close to 600GB of data using it 3/4 of the 750GB formatted space. The new disks are 5400 RPM and were pretty slow to write. But that's fine, this computer is not my gaming rig where I want fast load times. It's mostly photo editing, light video editing and mostly blog work and business matters on this computer. So space is more important than speed. I would have got the 7200rpm drives if needed more speed, or spanned some SSDs in RAID-0.



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9 comments
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That's a nice storage bump... You will be peaceful for some time with 6TB!

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Hah yeah I think so too.. should last me a few years unless I go on a huge photography run.

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I hear you there... lol... Only the SD Card is the limit... until you transfer data to the computer... and than it's time for the another turn... lol...

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Hah luckily my memory card on my DSLRs are pretty big. Glad to finally have hard drive space with more than my cameras storage.

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Nice! But won't you need to upgrade the RAM as well? 750 GB to 6 TB is not such a huge difference, it seems. Would the CPU fan also be able to handle such a huge bump?

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Yeah I got about 16gb of Ram so that's enough for my non gaming machine.

I plan on upgrading the CPU and motherboard soon so that's next.

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Thats really a huge upgrade
I guess the system would be obviously superfast as long you Also complement this upgrade with RAM adjustment I suppose

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Yeah almost 10x the storage now. Should be nice and roomy for awhile.

My computer has about 16gb of RAM and I dont do much on it that would use it all up at the moment.

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