switching hard drives

jdjuice

Junior Member
May 23, 2005
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I currently have a 200gb IDE drive, and I just bought an 80gb SATA drive in the interest of a speed increase. I want to move my operating system and programs onto the SATA drive and use the IDE drive for music, movies and other media. Can I possibly move everything onto my SATA drive and still have everything boot correctly? Since right now I'm only using around 60 gb of my IDE drive, I was thinking I could copy everything from my IDE drive to my SATA drive then switch the drive letters, but I'm not sure if that would work. Any ideas on how this might work? Thanks.
 

Fresh Daemon

Senior member
Mar 16, 2005
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You can do it, but it'll cost you. There's software to clone a drive from Norton (Ghost), Acronis, and probably more. I've used Ghost and it works well. None of this is free software and I haven't been able to find any free equivalents - someone else may know of some.

You can't just copy all the files across. You also need the MBR (master boot record) and so forth, which a straight file copy won't duplicate for you.
 

jdjuice

Junior Member
May 23, 2005
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I figured the mbr would be the problem if I tried it. I'll look into Ghost, maybe someone else will know of something free. Viva Open Source!
 

Crism

Senior member
Mar 15, 2003
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Norton Ghost seems to be the best out there. I've used it for a computer here at work, and just yesterday I ghosted my old laptop hard drive directly onto the new drive and it works PERFECTLY fine :)
 

bob4432

Lifer
Sep 6, 2003
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what 80GB sata hdd did you get? unless it is one of the 10,000k rpm ones you will not see a speed increase over the 200 pata drive (they are both ide).
 

JimPhelpsMI

Golden Member
Oct 8, 2004
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Hi, Check the manufacture of the drive's site. Most have a free cloning program. It is usually included on the setup for the drive. Maxtor's is called Maxblast. Their latest one's won't work on any other make drives. If you just copy you won't get all the files and nothing will work. Luck, Jim
 

bwnv

Senior member
Feb 3, 2004
419
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A lot of the manufactures have free diag software that includes a utility for doing this. Check thier websites. :)
 

bob4432

Lifer
Sep 6, 2003
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Originally posted by: jdjuice
For real? I got one of the SATAII Hitachi drives.

in all reality the interface is not the bottleneck, the mechanical part of the hdd is. sataII, from what i have read will give you very high strs when in striping raids with 2-4 hdds as will sataI, but for the normal desktop user, there is no advantage and they only really shine in benchmarks, again for the average user.

those hitachis are fast, but you probably won't notice much of a difference compared to what you have because the 200GB is still relatively knew and fast. in a benchmark program i would say you would see a small increase, but in the "seat of the pants" i doubt you will be able to tell them apart if you were to do a blind test.

to have a noticeable speed improvement, you would need to go either a 74GB raptor 10,000k rpm or 10 or 15krpm scsi, and since you are using 60GB, the scsi is out of the question since the 36GB in the speeds i mentioned are $120-$200. many will say the performance is not worth the $$$ spent, that is a personal opinion and not for me to make for anybody. i like my 10k rpm scsi and when i find a 15krpm for a good price i will buy it and put it in in the 10krpms place.

sorry :(
 

bob4432

Lifer
Sep 6, 2003
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Originally posted by: jdjuice
Ah, oh well, it was cheap anyway, and it's SOOOO much cooler to have sata anyway :)

glad it was cheap and the cables are smaller, but that is basically the only difference currently.