Installing 2nd HDD - Raw Read Error Rate?

[2ndFifer]

So I've got what I think will be a simple, possibly silly question. I am not a clever man.

I've got a 640GB drive in my PC now, it's been my primary for 2 years. Has my OS, all my games, etc. Works fine, all is well and good. But I'm wanting some extra space and I'd like to move my games onto a different drive.

So I bought another hard drive just a few moments ago, should arrive sometime next week.

Question being - how hard is it to install a second hard drive? Just for the sake of putting...stuff...on it. Not the OS, just games, pictures, etc. Is it as simple as just sticking it in the bay, hooking up the sata/power cable, booting up and happy day there it is showing up as a new drive with a fancy new letter?

Or is there something else to it?

Thanks for any assistance.

 

[tomatthe]

You would also need to format it which is pretty trivial as well. Adding another drive should be a pretty simple matter when you're aren't trying to switch the OS drive, or use raid or any other complications like that.

 

[2ndFifer]

Well that's neat.

So uh...formatting the drive. That entails...something in the BIOS, or something I do after Windows has booted up again?

I've built several PCs with just one drive formatting for the OS and what not, but I've never just stuck a second one in after everything was set up.

(As a side question, I bought a sata 3 drive - but my motherboard has only sata 2 ports? Is it accurate to assume that that shouldn't matter at all, and that since it's not a SSD it probably wouldn't benefit much from sata 3 anyway?)

Thanks!

 

[RetiredChief]

(1) Install New HDD.
(2) Windows will NOT initialy see it (Will not show up in my computer) - you must first initalize the drive.
... Go to disk manager. Control panel -> System & Scurity. at the bottom you will click on Create and format.......
(3) You will find your New HDD, should be "Drive1 (Your first HDD is drive0). right click the drive to initialize. Must initialize be for you can partition and format the drive. After initalizing it , partition (may do more than one partition) and format the partition(s).

Added: Sata III HDDs are more a marketing tool. The ONLY benifit is burst speed and you will see litle to NO difference between a SATA III HDD on Sata III vs Sata II.
I did buy a SATA III HDD when they first came out, the last 3 1 TB drives that I've bought - reverted back to SATA II HDDs.
Currently only SATA III SSDs benifit by being on SATA III.

 

[Hawkeye22]

To format the drive, you need to go into disk management and "initialize" the drive. make the partition the full size of the drive, then format. it's trivial.

Right-click my computer and select "manage". You will see disk management in the left pane.

To move your games, backup your game saves, uninstall your games and reinstall onto the new drive, then move your backed up game saves to the appropriate game save folder folder.

The sata 3 drive should work fine on a sata2 controller although the throughput will be limited to sata2 speeds.

 

[2ndFifer]

Awesome. About what I was expecting but just wanted things clear in my noggin before I jumped into it next week.

Thanks and cheers to all, really appreciate it.

 

[2ndFifer]

Sorry if I shouldn't be posting this in the same thread, now that it's a different question, but I figured might as well.

Hard drive got here Monday, I put it in, initialized/formatted without a hitch. I've been moving over Steam and a bunch of other stuff over the past several days off and on with zero issues. However this morning I thought I heard a "click of death" noise, ever so briefly. I was lying in bed half asleep, and I also happen to have 3 birds of varying sorts and a chinchilla all of which could've been responsible for said noise so I might just be being overly paranoid. I have also not heard it since so far as I can tell, and I've been installing/moving stuff all day.

That being said I ran DiskCheckup when I first woke up and ran a quick scan, and it seemed to freeze at 10% for a solid 10 minutes. It also wouldn't let me abort the scan. So I restarted my PC, booted it up and ran the scan again. It had in the SMART history some data, but one number concerns me. The "Raw Read Error Rate". Where it was previously at a solid 100, it was now showing a 95. I let it do an extended scan afterwords, took about 40 minutes - and that came up completely clean (see below, I think that's completely "clean" but I'm not sure).

After that I did some gaming and other things, and decided to do another quick scan. I'm now getting some 96, 97, and now I seem to be getting 95.

It looks like all other values are pretty much the same.

I don't know much about SMART attributes other than what I've read, so my interpretation of this data is rather limited. But can someone tell me, is my drive going to take a *** on me next week? Within the past 6 hours my Raw Read Error Rate has gone from 100, to 95, back to 100 for a good several scans, 96, then 97, now pretty consistent 95's.

Thanks for any help for information.

Edit:

An update, I just now did an "Extended Scan" rather than a quick scan, and I'm back to 100 100 16 0, as in the first image. Can I safely ignore the 95's I was getting earlier? Or should I put this in for an RMA or do something else?

Another Edit:

Any time I do an extended scan, I always come up with 100 100 16 0, like the first image. With an extended scan I never seem to get anything in the 90's whatsoever. It only seems to get reported that way from a portion of my "quick" scans.