Have been thinking of replacing my hard drive it is a 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA drive if, I change it out can I go with a 1Tb or 2Tb 7200 RPM drive and, if I replace it will I have to re-buy my operating system or can I continue to use the one I have.

Can you swap out for a larger drive? Absolutely. Can you keep your operating system software? You should be able to. What software is it and how old is your PC?

Have you considered adding a SSD drive instead? Load your operating system on it, and relegate your existing 500gb drive to storage only. That should speed up your system quite a bit as well.

You can transfer an identical copy of your smaller 500gb hard drive onto the new larger drive. Many new hard drives purchased in retail packaging comes with free software to do this. If you don't get free software, then Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image will work.

If you have a desktop computer, consider just adding the second drive as additional space, and move your files over to give the operating system room to breathe.

Also, if you can afford it, I really recommend going with an SSD instead of a 7200 RPM drive. The performance gain is really really worth it.

Have done that several times. The last time was to a 1 TB SSD. Pricing on the solid state drives is still a good bit higher than SATA but their speed is worth it in my opinion.

There may be other programs but I have used HDClone. Works fine going from smaller drive to larger or to equal capacity drives. Works easiest when you have a set of cables or USB connection so you can clone from current drive directly to the new one. Then physically swap them after the cloning process. There’s probably a YouTube video out there somewhere.

Pretty sure you can download a free copy of HDClone from CNET or other sources.

Michael

What is the problem you are trying to solve? If you just need more space, like Aeteocles said, you can add another drive, either internal, or external, and move your files (photos, music, video) to the new drive. 500Gb is plenty of space for the OS and programs.

I just did that not long ago.

I swapped a 1 TB drive in to replace a much smaller one. There is a device that you put both drives in, press the button and in a while everything on the small drive is on the large drive. You bolt the new large drive in and it’s like nothing happened, except you have a larger drive.

That device was provided to me by a listmate, gratis, and I have it in trust to hand to the next guy in need.

Might that be you?

Shoot me an e-mail.

I've used Macrium Reflect to clone one drive to another. I'd recommend it.

I'd also recommend an SSD for the OS drive, and a large drive for storage space.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
Can you swap out for a larger drive? Absolutely. Can you keep your operating system software? You should be able to. What software is it and how old is your PC?

Have you considered adding a SSD drive instead? Load your operating system on it, and relegate your existing 500gb drive to storage only. That should speed up your system quite a bit as well.

PC is 5 or 6 years old the model is Pavilion 20-b010.
My main purpose is to speed up my machine, it is sluggish and things load slow. I have used IE 11, Edge, Chrome, & Wataerfox. some things take a long time to load such as miniclip 8 ball pool which takes mminutes (8-12) to load and sometimes never, my cursor freezes up and on IE11 I get a lot of recover page notifications.

My thinking was if I swapped out for a new/clean hard drive it might clean up some of these problems.

Based on what you just said above, cloning your drive to a new drive may not necessarily fix your issues.

If you have the installation disks and the key for your OS, I would recommend installing the new drive as the boot drive with a fresh OS installation and use the old drive as storage. You will need to reinstall applications too, but the data/picture/what have you can remain on the original drive as storage.

quote:

Originally posted by SIG 229R:

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
Can you swap out for a larger drive? Absolutely. Can you keep your operating system software? You should be able to. What software is it and how old is your PC?

Have you considered adding a SSD drive instead? Load your operating system on it, and relegate your existing 500gb drive to storage only. That should speed up your system quite a bit as well.

PC is 5 or 6 years old the model is Pavilion 20-b010.
My main purpose is to speed up my machine, it is sluggish and things load slow. I have used IE 11, Edge, Chrome, & Wataerfox. some things take a long time to load such as miniclip 8 ball pool which takes mminutes (8-12) to load and sometimes never, my cursor freezes up and on IE11 I get a lot of recover page notifications.

My thinking was if I swapped out for a new/clean hard drive it might clean up some of these problems.

If you copy the old drive to a new one, chances are excellent you'll copy the problems, too.

IMO what you need to do is clean up the existing drive/OS.

Back up your critical files to an external drive or cloud folder.

Then, assuming the problem drive isn't nearly full, which would be a problem itself, the first thing I would do is uninstall all programs I was certain I didn't need.

Next, I'd download Ccleaner and run it, using both the file cleaner (I don't recall exactly what it's called, but it deletes temp files and such) and also the registry cleaner. You may have to run the registry cleaner multiple times before it finds no more problems.

Of course, you also need to be sure you have a good antivirus installed, up to date, and working. It would be a good idea to also download and run Malwarebytes.

Doing these things will likely make a big difference, in my experience.

New HDD isn't going to solve your problem. New SSD might make it a little bit better, but not worth the $$$. That PC has an AMD E-1 processor, which was slow when it came out.

1. Take Rusbro's advice (especially backing things up). This will help & is free.
2. Reinstall OS - free if you have all the disks/keys. HP probably left a restore program/partition in the computer, it will 'reset' everything back to the day you bought it quickly & easily.
3. Spend 5-600$ for a new machine. 1-200$ isn't going to do much, if anything for your current machine, it's guts aren't upgradeable. You can get a good refurb i3 for ~200, add a monitor/keyboard/mouse and you're less then 400. Anything with an intel 'core' processor from the last 4 years will eat your machine for lunch.

Try 1 & 2 first, I think you'll notice the difference, but it's only a matter of time before that machine is obsolete for things that use CPU/GPU power - like games.

quote:

My thinking was if I swapped out for a new/clean hard drive it might clean up some of these problems.

A "larger" HD won't solve the problem unless you are out of hard drive space.
However, after many, many years of IT work I have seen spinning hard drives deteriorate performance over time.
That being said while replacing with another spinning drive will help but only marginally ~ replace with a SSD drive will make much more of a difference.

Get a 256 GB SSD for the OS and regularly accessed files keeping the 500 gig for archival storage.

That'd be the only hope of speeding up the fundamentals.

Try adding another user account. I've been having problems with my Win 7 Premium. We have an admin account and a "non-privileged" account for every day activities.

Adding a new non-privileged account and removing the old non-privileged account seemed to restore performance. Not as much as wiping the drive and re-installing the OS, but it's much better than it was. Takes all of 10 minutes or so to do. Maybe a little longer if you have to re-configure Outlook, etc...

quote:

miniclip 8 ball pool which takes mminutes (8-12) to load and sometimes never, my cursor freezes up and on IE11 I get a lot of recover page notifications

I think your existing hardware is more than sufficient for what you're trying to do and that your problems are OS/software related. The pool game looks to be a browser game - not anything requiring new hardware.

Think of your computer as a workbench. Every time you do something, you take a bunch of materials and tools out and work on your project a bit. When you start your next project, you use the materials and tools already on your workbench, take a few more things you need off the shelf, maybe put some things back. Over time, your work bench gets cluttered up with the random bits and pieces of leftover projects. At some point, you start a project, and midway through you have to stop your project because the fucking clamp you needed is holding another project together.

Computers are the same way.

You can try to cleanup the workbench by moving some stuff off of it, and trying to clean up the bits and pieces without disturbing the projects you are working on. This would be backing up your data and running programs like CCleaner to get rid of the bits and pieces.

You can try to add a second workbench to give yourself more space to work, but the first workbench is still going to suck.

You can try to buy a larger workbench to replace the first and move everything over, but it's still going to be just as disorganized.

Or you can just dump everything in the trash and start over with brand new tools and a fresh workbench. This would be reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling the OS and programs. This can be done automatically using the recovery partition in your computer if it has one, the installation media that came with your computer, or with the software key stored within your computer or on a sticker somewhere and some fresh installation media that you've downloaded and put on a USB or CD yourself.