Question on Google Drive as an external hard drive?

divineone

Reputable
Aug 20, 2014
4
0
4,510
Hey all,

I was looking for some advice on an idea I have for transferring a lot of my programs that take awhile to download such as World of Warcraft and other games to my new desktop. Would Google Drive be a good way to do this or would it virtually take the same amount of time to download the folder onto me new computer from the virtual drive?

My other idea would be just to put my old hard-drive into the new computer along with the one that came with the computer. Would this be feasible? Could I just transfer the files over via drag and drop and than remove my old hard-drive?

My new computer is

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8529717

I can't seem to find the manufacturers name on my old hard-drive I had a friend build me my last computer. It is a basic 300GB storage.

Any help, suggestions or advice is greatly appreciated!

 
Solution
Using a hard drive will be much much faster. Your upload speed will greatly hold you back trying to upload your files to google drive. The average ISP upload speed is around 5-10mbps (which is about 1 MBps), a hard drive can transfer data at 80-100x faster speed. To move 4GB of data with a 5mbps upload speed it would take 3 hours

Assuming both hard drives are SATA connection.
You shut down your computer, remove the power cable for good measure
Take your old hard drive and set it in the hard drive tray area (you dont have to screw it in for a something temporary like this), now connect a power connector it it from the power supply and use the sata cable from the old computer and plug the cable from the hard drive to one of the sata...

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Using Google Drive would probably take MUCH longer than any local transfers. Google Drive has to upload to the web before any other device sees the files. If you can load something into Google Drive, you can share it locally. Local sharing would operate at LAN speed (100Mbit or 1000Mbit) as opposed to the (typical) < 10Mbit upload WAN speed.
 
Using a hard drive will be much much faster. Your upload speed will greatly hold you back trying to upload your files to google drive. The average ISP upload speed is around 5-10mbps (which is about 1 MBps), a hard drive can transfer data at 80-100x faster speed. To move 4GB of data with a 5mbps upload speed it would take 3 hours

Assuming both hard drives are SATA connection.
You shut down your computer, remove the power cable for good measure
Take your old hard drive and set it in the hard drive tray area (you dont have to screw it in for a something temporary like this), now connect a power connector it it from the power supply and use the sata cable from the old computer and plug the cable from the hard drive to one of the sata ports on the new motherboard.
You can now power back on the computer and once it boots it should recognize the second drive and you can just drop and drop files over to it.

You can also create a newtork share folder on the old desktop, move your files to that folder that you want to copy, and then on the new computer you open that share folder and copy the files to the new desktop. To do this you will need to have both desktops on and connected to your router via ethernet lan cable.


If you dont have 40+ GB of data to move then why dont you just buy a 16gb flash drive, you can even find USB 3.0 speed drives on sale for $10-15
 
Solution

TRENDING THREADS