Installing hadr drive

SATA power cables are notorious for coming loose so be sure to insert it fully into the connector. Connect one end of a SATA data cable to the hard drive's data connector.

Here's how a SATA data cable looks like:. As always, your motherboard manual is your best friend when learning how to install a hard drive. Step 4. After you create an installation media, you need to access the BIOS, restart your computer, and press a required key as the screen shows. Step 5. This part is about how to install Windows 10 on your new hard drive easily, the content should be how to clone OS from an old hard drive to the new one, rather than a fresh install.

As mentioned above, the manners of installing Windows 10 from an external drive are involved that many novices operate hardly. Step 6. Slide your hard drive into the hard drive tray. Fasten the hard drive to the tray with screws. Step 2. Open the computer case, and plug in the SATA data cable to the motherboard of your computer. Step 3. Now, you've installed the second hard drive into your computer.

All you need is to press the power button to restart your computer and enter the next guide to set up the second hard drive. To make your hard drive showing up and detected correctly in your computer, you need to initialize the disk, setting up a correct partition style, and create partitions on your disk. EaseUS Partition Master with its New Disk Guide feature makes it easy and simple for you: partition hard drive and initialize disk at the same time. Once the customization is done, click "Proceed".

Choosing a drive that fits your budgets and does what you need is the first step. These days, your most important choice is between a traditional hard drive or a solid state drive SSD. But there are few other things to think about, too. Modern SSDs are amazing, and are a worthy upgrade to just about any system. Moving from a regular drive to an SSD improves speed across your system.

You PC will start faster, load apps and large files faster, and decrease load times in most games. The trouble is, once you get past a terabyte of storage space, SSDs start to get prohibitively expensive. Alternately, conventional hard drives are slower, but offer huge amounts of storage relatively cheaply. You can also combine the strengths of SSDs and hard drives. If your desktop can handle more than one drive and most of them can , you can install your operating system on the main SSD for speedy access to programs and essential files, and use a large capacity traditional drive for storing files.

But for most people, a smaller SSD combined with a larger hard drive is a great compromise. Hard drives typically come in two sizes: 2. The 3. The possible exception to this are the super-small form factor PCs that can only handle a 2. Some desktop PCs have built in mounting points for 2. And speaking of SSDs, there is one more form factor to talk about: the M.

These drives actually look more like a stick of RAM than a hard drive. One other note about laptops. If your PC only offers the older 4-pin Molex cables, you can buy adapters that work just fine.

Some like the one pictured below have a straight plug on one end and an L-shaped plug on the other end. The L-shaped plug makes it easier to fit into jacks that are closer to other components. One other word on SATA drives. The same goes for the SATA cable you buy.

So you might not want to splurge on the fastest SSD you can get. Getting more storage on an SSD will be more important to most people than getting more speed. It might be worth the small price premium versus a standard hard drive. Your next step is to decide whether you want to transfer your operating system to the new drive or just do a clean installation and start fresh. There are pros and cons for each. Transferring your operating system and all your data and installed apps means not having to worry about reinstalling Windows, setting it up the way you like it again, and then reinstalling each of your apps.

The bad news is that this is a slow and tedious process.