Different hard drives

Afternoon all

I have two 160 hard drives in my system. I want to get a WD 320gig hd for my media. Will that conflict with my system, will vista allow both hard drive to work together. Thanks

 

Well, Vista will accept any number of hard drives in a system. And if your notebook supports three internal drives you shouldn't have a problem. I don't know if you mean "work together" as in a RAID setup, but thats another matter. I never tried creating a RAID setup after awhile.

If you want to use an external drive there also shouldn't be a problem.

 

If you were going to swap out your 2nd internal HDD for the 320GB you will be fine. All HDDs will work with any OS. Now you will see sometimes a HDD won't be recognized when you are doing a clean install because the drivers aren't included in the Vista or XP install disk, but once the OS is installed you won't have a problem with HDDs being recognized by Windows.

The only thing you have to be sure about is that the 320GB that you are buying is a SATA if you plan on installing it internally. If it is a external it doesn't matter. All external drives will work with Vista, so you don't have to worry about compatibility issues (Unless you format the HDD with a MAC format or something, although you'll still be able to see the HDD in Windows and reformat with NTFS if you want to).

 

thanks for the info

 

I was under the impression that in order to run RAID both hard drives had to be the same size?

 

It does. Size and speed.

 

You can use the smallest HDDs size and even if you have a bigger HDD it will only use as much as the smallest HDD and waste the rest.

 

Yeah - I meant that too - my point being, wouldn't it be a waste to use two different sized drives when it only uses the size of the smaller one? Why not just get a drive that's the same size? I'm OCD - THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE!!!

 

Anyways, I don't think he is even using RAID to begin with, because he doesn't even mention it in his original post. When you get 2 HDDs in a laptop from HP they are always the same size, so it doesn't necessarily mean that it is a RAID.
I doubt he has a RAID setup going on, so I think his question is just a basic what kind of HDD can I put in my laptop?

 

Wouldn't it be cool to get 2x200GB 7200RPMS in that system and set it up as a raid. DAMN.

 

Well RAID was mentioned so I got curious! Don't have a cow man!

 

See that's the problem when people type, you misinterpret their tone sometimes. I wasn't having a cow, I just didn't want lamont72 to get confused and get the wrong idea for his basic question. I don't mind talking about RAID, I just wanted to make sure that he knew he could put any size HDD inside his computer.

 

I didn't think you were seriously having a cow - otherwise I wouldn't have included the scared face. Just trying to spice up your life. ;-)

 

LMAO. what a retard.

 

There are many more ways to spice up people's lives you know. I don't think telling someone they are having a cow is one of 'em.

 

Oh Yitzter ... That hurts daddy when you say that

I make it a point to laugh at myself whenever possible.

Besides - you found it funny.

 

I think I just had a cow reading all these posts... Nope not a cow but I guess I do need to go to the bathroom cuz I laughed so hard I pee'd a little bit! Ha :laugh: