follow up question: is my motherboard capable of handling two hard drives? I've googled it & can't find anything confirming whether it can or not https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z270-GAMING-PRO-CARBON.html
answered I have a PC that I want to eventually get a SSD and a terabyte snaildrive with the next stimulus & wipe & reinstall the OS onto the SSD, but if I can buy a terabyte snaildrive that's straight up better than what I already have I wanna just wipe my computer now & put the OS on the new one.
someone is selling this for $5 in my area https://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinfo_details.php?lang=en&model=WDC%20WD10EAVS. This is what I already have in my PC https://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinfo_details.php?lang=en&model=SEAGATE%20ST3500418AS
For some reason the format for the specs on this site are completely different so my brain cant figure; is the new hard drive an upgrade from the old one (aside from just being better size)? Should I buy the cheap bigdrive and just wait to get a SSD to put the OS onto & wait to wipe or is the new drive just a straight up upgrade & I should just get it & put the OS onto that right away?
okay follow up question if you (or someone else) dont mind: is my motherboard capable of multiple hard drives? I've googled its specs & cant find anything that mentions it https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z270-GAMING-PRO-CARBON.html
i bought this PC used like 10 years ago for $50 from a PC shop when I was walking an hour to & from work every day & that was literally all I had scraped together for keeping myself sane at the end of a year of putting everything away that I could & a local PC shop let me have it instead of throwing it away bc of its horrifically outdated specs. Against all recommendation by the shop instead of throwing it away & just buying a new used PC with better specs I've just been piecemeal-ing 1 newer part into it every year or so. The motherboard is ridiculous bc I couldn't upgrade my GPU for the old one bc the old GPU that was incapable of playing modern games anymore was the most powerful GPU the old motherboard's format was capable of fitting, so I future-proofed it, then I spent 6 months with an alert on craigslist for used computers & found someone that let me salvage their GPU out of a PC they were gonna throw out for $50. Bought new RAM off someone on FB for $20, now I'm freeing myself from the shackles of 500 gig. I think the only thing I bought new on this thing was its power source & liquid cooling fan & the only original (major) parts left is my hard drive. The PC shop guy and my IT friend both keep beating their fists on the ground begging me to just toss it but fuck them, this is my baby it's carried me thru a lot of hard times & I'm returning it the favor. Until the day its case can't contain what I need from it it'll stay slotted into the cartridge-like spot I build for it under my desk. Also its case has exactly 0 RGB elements & even if you dropped a grand on my lap to just get a new PC I'd have a hard time finding one that looks as good (read as: un-obnoxious & under-stated) as it does
edit: it has a horizontal gap on the underside of the case right behind the door on the front that's just perfect for a hand; I can stand the tower up on my shoulder, reach my hand up into the slot & grab it with my hand facing backwards to keep it balanced while I shoulder the heavy thing. the day I bought it I walked it home over my shoulder thru knee deep snow for an hour & a half. Idk why but that memory stands out really distinctly in my head.
thats why im not passing it up. Even if it turns out my motherboard doesn't have slots for 2 hard drives I'd still want to switch to this while I wait to afford a terabyte SSD -- I jsut cant do 500 gigs anymore lol
Hard drives connect via SATAIII, that board has 6 headers for them. As long as you have the cables and your power supply has the watts you should be fine.
If you buy a used drive check the SMART information and run a full disk scan (this will take hours most likely) before putting anything valuable on it. You can do this using various tools. Speedfan is one for windows but there are plenty of others (don't mess with other stuff in speedfan unless you know what you're doing though, you can fuck your PC if you mess with clocks/voltages).
A note about the $5 drive. WD green drives are made targeting low electricity usage and efficiency and you'll likely see better performance off your existing drive. WD-Blue is what I'd suggest but if you're just using it for storage and not critical OS files or whatever it shouldn't matter and for $5 it's not easy to beat (assuming of course it isn't in a failing state which the SMART and running a full disk scan should inform you of).
🤔 hm, maybe I should have my PC wired up for dual-hard drives using this terabyte snaildrive, then when I do get my SSD just unplug my old snaildrive & plug the SSD in in its place
Or keep all three. Store backups of critical data/memes on your 500GB drive if you really don't need it for anything actively. Just make sure you have the right cables. You need SATA III for data (which many drives new don't come with anyways) and then power which should be off a connector from your power supply, typically a long cable with multiple power connectors.
One warning I'll mention about SSDs, although I've never had one fail personally, when they do fail they often do so catastrophically. Old spinning disks usually give warnings and indications and fail gradually and you can often recover data, with SSDs not always so. SSDs also have a maximum number of writes so if you buy one used I would be sure to check the SMART data on it as well within the return period to make sure it isn't near the end of its reliable life as far as total terabytes written.
