Will this ADDITIONAL hard drive be compatible with my motherboard?

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tojonegi

tojonegi

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Hi. I've decided to upgrade my hard drive as Im running out of space!
But I'm confused if this new hard drive will be compatible with my Mobo or not? If yes, then will it give the best performance. I don't have my concepts clear about the compatibility, so maybe you guys can help me out.
My Mobo has 2 x SATA3 and 2 x SATA2 slots. And currently I have 1x 2TB internal hard drive. (link below) and an Optical DVD drive.
So, please tell me will I be able to smoothly run this 3TB hard drive (link below), in ADDITION to my old drive?
How does this work exactly? How do I figure out if my DVD drive is connected to SATA3 or SATA2? Does it matter, which port I connect the HD/SSD/DVD drive to?
And what happens if in future I decide to add another 250GB SSD to it? Will I be able to do that? Or then I'd have to get a new mobo?
Is there any limitation of the capacity of hard drives I can connect to my Mobo or my Mobo can only support/read upto that? Should I worry about that, Because the total space after upgrade would be 5TB.
Please help me clear out these basics and let me know if this upgrade would be compatible :)

Hard Drive Im planning to buy:
WD Caviar Green 3 TB

Hard Drive I currently have:
Western Digital WD Green WD20EZRX

My Motherboard:
ASRock H81M

Thankyou for the help :) Tips and advises are welcomed :D
 
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Each of those hard drives have 64MB of cache which will be faster on the SATA3 ports. The DVD drive doesn't really need the speed of the SATA3 port and could be moved to SATA2. If you move your boot drive to another port make sure you change it in your BIOS. If you add a SSD that should really go on the SATA3 and move the non boot drive to the SATA2. To see what ports everything is connected to it should be labeled on the motherboard what type of port it is, it may also have a different color. For any size over 2TB you will need to change to GPT partitioning scheme in the OS before you format the drive.
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Saberus

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Aug 23, 2013
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I don't see your DVD drive needing SATA3 speeds, but the drives and controllers are all compatible between SATA versions, and will operate at the speed of the slower of the drive or controller.

Both hard drives are SATA3, but having a WD Green drive on a SATA2 port isn't going to impact performance much, if at all.
 
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X3773

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Each of those hard drives have 64MB of cache which will be faster on the SATA3 ports. The DVD drive doesn't really need the speed of the SATA3 port and could be moved to SATA2. If you move your boot drive to another port make sure you change it in your BIOS. If you add a SSD that should really go on the SATA3 and move the non boot drive to the SATA2. To see what ports everything is connected to it should be labeled on the motherboard what type of port it is, it may also have a different color. For any size over 2TB you will need to change to GPT partitioning scheme in the OS before you format the drive.
 
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tojonegi

tojonegi

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Thankyou soo much for your reply and the additional info, it might have just saved my day :)
I checked my Mobo and the SATA ports are not color coded, instead they are marked as SATA_0, SATA_1...SATA_3, so I checked the manual and both the drives (HD and DVD) are connected to SATA3 ports only.
So, luckily, the extra steps of moving the boot drive to another port and changing it in the BIOS is not required, I guess?
So, now I can simply move the DVD to SATA2 port and connect the new hard drive to SATA3 port and its done?

But, there's the question of

How do I go on about doing that? o_O

P.S. Will doing any of this format my old hard drive or my OS, even by accident? I have alot of BIG and heavy architecture softwares and work files that I dont want to lose. :(

Thankyou so much for your help.

 
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X3773

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Since you don't need to move your boot drive you shouldn't need to change the boot order in the BIOS. After plugging in the new hard drive and formatting the drive it will show up as a new drive. Now if you want to expand your existing hard from 2TB to 5TB with the new drive you will need a RAID setup. For your set up I would go with a JBOD which will turn the 2 hard drives into 1. I haven't used JBOD before so I don't know for sure if you can keep existing data on the drive. This is also a little harder to set up as the BIOS needs to have the hard drives set as RAID and not AHCI. If they are not set as RAID you will need to install the OS drivers before you switch the settings. I wasn't able to find a compete guide on how to set it up but it can be very hard for someone who hasn't done it before.

I'm assuming your using Windows. As long as you don't select your old hard drive it won't change anything. If you try to format your old drive it may give a warning about the drive being in use. Guide for GPT partitioning: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725671.aspx
 
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tojonegi

tojonegi

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Thankyou for your reply :*
That sounds complicated. :/ So, what should I do? I currently have my 2TB hard drive divided into 3 partitions (C, D and E). I want the new drive the be installed as 2 new partitions of 1.5TB each, or maybe 3 new partitions of 1TB each.
Isn't there an easy or straight forward way of doing it?

The people at WD make it look so much easier, what are they missing?
Checkout this video

Help me:(
 
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X3773

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If your going with partitions then you don't need to worry about JBOD. You would use JBOD if you only had one partition of C and wanted more space on that partition. Just plug in the new drive, change the drive to GPT partitioning and set up your partitions. Then your good to go.

So in the end you would have drive letters C, D, E, F, G, I.
 
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tojonegi

tojonegi

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Okay buddy, I hope it runs as smoothly when I get the drive :)
Sorry for the late response.

You've been a great help! :D
Thankyou so much

You're the best!
 
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