turn boot hard drive into storage drive

i recently received a ssd for Christmas (thank you mom and dad), and i was curious if there was a way to turn my current boot drive into a storage drive.

what I was intending was to install the SSD, and then delete the windows and system files from my current hard drive.

is there a particular way to go about doing this? I have a 500gb HDD that has 350GB worth of data on it, and I have a 60GB SSD that i want to use as a boot drive, and as you can infer, i'm unable to just transfer all of my files over. I have a 1TB external hard drive connected via USB 2.0, but the transfer speeds are a bit slow.

is this possible and stable to just delete the windows files off the hard drive, and use the hdd as a storage drive that way, or will i have to reformat the drive completely and reload all of my software / data?

 

No need to reformat completely.

Just set the SSD as the boot drive first and install Windows

After thats done, just slap on the HDD and delete the older windows files and what not. It will just show up as a regular storage drive in windows.

Personally id put it all your storage data into your external first (for backup purposes), and format the HDD and put it the data back.

 

Yeah what flipfire said, literally your old HDD will show up as if a 2nd hard drive (or external if you choose to do it that way).

 

i have two storage devices on my old alienware notebook and i just added a secondary hdd as a storage unit, but i've never turned my boot disk to a storage hard drive.

thanks for the answer! i'm just going to back up school files and maybe a few other things.

so will programs work correctly from my old hard drive when running them on the new boot drive?

 

No. Programs are bound by the registry and will not work with your new boot drive.