Novice Builder Advice

[pcbuilder_69]

Hello All,

I am currently building my 4th PC for a family member that has a small business. The main focus of this build would be lots of storage space. The user is very limited on PC tech type things and wants to have a trouble free and easy way to keep all the day to day personal and business data saved. The current PC is very old, slow and about maxed out on space. Keep in mind although I am on my 4th build I am limited on the software and advanced OS settings/configuration side of things.

Here is my problem. I wanted to go with a large single HDD so that they could have lots of space to store data without having to add another HDD for a long time. I went with a 3TB Hitachi drive. The system is built, the OS (Win 7 64bit) is installed and updated and I installed antivirus software and is up to date. Prior to installing the rest of the software, MS office, QuickBooks and such, I viewed the system information to verify Windows was displaying all the correct harware, I noticed that it was only showing 2TB for the HDD. The Hitachi HDD package did say to go to a website to utilize the full 3TB, after going there it said i could get the full 3TB but that I could not use as a boot drive.

My main questions are, to keep it simple and keep cost down do I just leave it alone and worry about adding another HDD in the future knowing I'm wasting 1TB of space? Do I add another smaller HDD or SSD for the boot drive and use the 3TB for future storage only? If i go HDD i'm thinking 2TB, If i go SSD i'm thinking a cheaper 30g or so just for the OS and main programs but ive heard that going that route the user has to be a bit savy on manualy saving data in the correct place and I want to keep it as simple and user friendly as possible.

Thank you to any willing to give any constructive advice,
Eric

 

[ssddx]

the largest boot drive windows 7 will accept is 2tb. this is why your 3tb drive appears as only 2tb. lose the space or get a boot drive it is up to you.

keep in mind that the drives 1.5tb and above seem to fail alot more often then 1tb and below. if utilizing large hard drives i HIGHLY suggest regular backups or a raid 1 array. i've had 3 (not hitachi) drives fail on me in under 10 months. one even lasted less than a month. i would hate to see so much data get lost.

if you want to put programs on your boot drive and use an SSD i would go for a minimum of 50-60gb. my windows install and less than 5 programs alone was 30gb.
having a boot drive and a storage drive really isn't an issue as long as they know to install on the one and store on the other. if they can understand folders they can understand that.

 

[pcbuilder_69]

Thx for the reply ssddx, im leaning towards just leaving as is and eating the the extra TB of space just to keep it simple and no additional cost. Lesson learned heh