Hard Drive Upgrade questions from Newbie

Hey gang,

I'm a newbie to this forum. I was doing a search on some informaiton on upgrading my hard drive for more free space, which brought me to this site.

I have a Gateway Notebook P-7805U FX
It came with a 320GB HD, and I am almost maxed out.
I would like to upgrade to something larger. From what I can find,
I would be able to switch to a 1TB HD ? unless there is something larger.

My main question is the correct and safe way to merge everything from my current HD to the new one? I did see an article about "Cloning" your HDs first. I assume that's what I'm looking to do?

Any information would be helpful. If there's any more info you need from me to give me guidance, let me know.

Here's a link to the info page on my laptop.
Gateway P-7805u FX Review

Thanks in advance.
Joey

PS - I do have a second drive in my laptop.

 

You do know it has two HDD drive bays and you can add a extra HDD to just store data and extra files and just keep 320 for O/S and programs install and that should work for you. And the biggest laptop HDD I saw was 1TB.

 

I would suggest getting a SSD and installing your OS on that. That way you won't have to clone anything. Your data on your current (which will act as a secondary) will stay on there and the OS will go on the SSD which will improve speed (plus give you another 100 odd GB of storage space).

 

If he's filled 320GB drive and is considering a 1TB drive, an SSD which is going to REDUCE the amount of HDD space they have isn't necessarily helping... What does he do once he gets the SSD? His 320GB HDD is still full, so it hasn't assisted his issue in any way. Plus while an SSD is the best performance upgrade you can give most systems, the majority of users simply don't have a need/use for it. Their priority will remain with large HDD capacities until SSD's become larger & at a lower price point.

100GB isn't alot for someone who is looking at an upgrade because they're running out of space, hence the 1TB drive.

 

I second what StormJumper is suggesting. Your model of laptop has two HDD bays, so the simplest solution is to just buy a new one and plug it in. You won't have to worry about cloning and backing stuff up and whatever.

1TB is the largest out there so far, but only 5400RPM. The largest 7200rpm right now are 750GB.

 

If you do end up cloning, IMO the only way to do it right is with Acronis. Free if any of your drives are Western Digital. Really very easy to use.

The reason I'm even giving you this info is because you might still want to boot off the new drive you get because it will be faster.

 

Seagate also gives a free copy as well. At any rate, it should work so long as *one* of OP's drives is a WD or Seagate (since he's purchasing a new drive, this should be no problem). You're not limited to only transferring to another WD drive.

 

Yeah, thats why I said ANY of the drives are western digital. Really, Acronis for Seagate too?

That would have saved me some time here having just cloned a Toshiba to a WD to a Seagate.

 

Thanks for all of the Feedback.

I do have a drive in the second bay as well. I'm gong to upgrade them both.
I'm going to go with the 750GB because of them being available with 7200RPM. Looks like after reading many comments on Seagate pausing and clicking, I'm going to go with WD.

Are there any other upgrades to my system that you can also recommend?
I did read about 1920x1200 display upgrade. I may look into that next. Thanks for any suggestions and info.

Joey

 

No problem man!

Opps, I read "any" as "all" for some reason when I posted... -egg on face-

But yeah, Seagate has a similar deal, same goes for Intel (SSDs) and Samsung (SSDs also). Probably more, but I haven't checked everyone out.

 

Not all SSD manufacturers offer the software for free, some sell data transfer packages with their drives. I'm actually surprised Samsung offers this as they sell packages with Notron Ghost too.