Windows 10: Advice on setting up a new HDD for data (not OS)

Hey all,

Purchased a WD Black 2 TB HDD today to replace my old drive. This drive is not for my OS but is used for data - photo's music, my documents, downloaded program installers etc and for system backups.

I also run 2 SSD's - one 500GB for the OS and programs and one 250GB exclusively for Lockheed Martin's Prepar3D and associated add-on's. Both SSD's have plenty space on them.

Question 1.
What is the best way to set this new HDD up? I can "initialise" in Windows 10 Disk Management with either MBR or GPT partition. Which is better for my system? Anything else I should consider beyond this?

2.
Is there merit in splitting this HDD into two 1TB partitions? I don't really need two partitions but the data I will transfer to this new disk from my backup is about 700 GB - so not even half the 2 TB capacity of the disk.

Bottom line - I am all about getting max performance (speed) out of my system.

:)

 

Data lost when transacted in a HDD which was shutdown using hibernate option

Hi,

I had a trouble with one of HDD in laptop so i bought a new one.

To copy data before i changed HDD which already had OS,i shutdown the laptop,took out the faulty HDD and connected the new HDD and booted the OS.

Now i connected the faulty HDD as external drive and copied data from it to new HDD which was earlier shutdown using hibernate option.

But post restart the HDD shows freedrive space to be occipued but no data or folders to be seen.Please help.this has around 8 years of data.

 

Copying file from one Sata internal hard disk to another internal Sata Hard disk on two different Windows 10 installations

Ok, so my situation is as per below :

1. I got 3 new desktops. Each with same hardware with an installation of windows 10 upgraded from windows 7.

2. I removed the hard disk from my old PCs and put them as secondary hard disk in the new PCs

3. I booted from my old HDD Os (also windows 10), I backed up the files and placed them on the partition of the new HDD in the new system.

4. Once I booted back to the New system Windows 10, I simply cannot see the files where I placed them. Although the space in the HDD is being shown as used, There is no way I can see those files here.

5. I booted from the Old HDD again and from there I am able to see the files are still there.

What I noticed is that the Drive letters changes depending on which windows installation I boot from. Could this be the problem ?

Apart from above, I backed up the data on the old HDD partition, when I booted in to the new HDD I could still see the backup data in old HDD from new HDD OS, however when I copied it to the new HDD it disappeared.

Exactly the same thing happened on all three PCs that I have upgraded/replaced. However for the other two, I managed to copy the data on an External Network Drive, this Data is easily readable in my new Setup.

Since this morning, the old HDD windows got corrupted and I am unable to boot to that OS and hence i am not able to copy that data to an external drive and from new HDD, I cannot see the data, although the space has been taken up (around 100 GB).

Can someone advise if anyone has faced similar problem/situation and if so How were you able to resolve it?

I have already tried the show all files etc options but non of them work to show these files from the new HDD OS.

Also I tried something, and now from New HDD OS, I am unable to access the old HDD C: Drive anymore. It gives me the error "Access is Denied"

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

1. Use GPT. MBR has a 2TB partition size limit and depending on how 2 TB is defined both for that partition limit and for the hard drive may mean you will lose a couple 100mb capacity if you do just one partition - not sure though. But there is no reason to not use GPT unless you are going to move that hard drive later to a system that is so old it does not support GPT.

2. Multiple partitions has advantages and disadvantages. The closer, physically, files are stored to each other on the hard drive, the faster your access time will be. So, lets say you have a bunch of documents and spreadsheets that you are going to access and change frequently, and you also have an archive of movies that you only watch occasionally and you never access both the documents and the movies at the same time. Then it would make sense to do one partition for each, and put the movies partitions at the end of the drive, so the movie files would not get in the way of the documents and spreadsheet files. Also you could then schedule a whole partition backup of your documents and spreadsheets every week or daily if you wanted, and only backup the movies partition when you added a movie once a month or so.

If you have two sets of files that you are going to access concurrently - lets say documents and photos - and lets say the document files contain and access the photo files frequently. Then having two partitions for the documents and for the photos would slow down access. Because the drive head would have to access the document file in the first partition and then skip over all the blank space on the drive between the end of the used space on the documents partition and the photos partition to get to the just the beginning of the photos partition, and then seek through part of that to get to the specific photo file. By having two partition you are intentionally adding blank physical the drive head must move over.

 

Perfect, thanks NavyLCDR. I will go with GPT and a single partition based on this info. Appreciate the good insight.

 

I keep two partitions for data as part of my backup strategy...

• One partition containing my data that needs periodic backup
• The other partition stores data files that don't need backup (e.g. movies and music I have copies of elsewhere). I don't really want to backup anything on this partition

Saves data backup time and space.