Question on how to add more storage to my pc?

Question

So I built my pc a week ago and started noticing 500gb wasn't enough for what I need. How do I add more storage to my pc?

I have a WD blue 500gb 7200rpm.

And I want to get a WD black 1tb 7200rpm.

But I don't know how to set it up? I looked through YouTube and other sites. I was thinking about this before I built my system and thought it wasn't going to be a problem. I thought that it would be easy to just set it a raid 0 . I was mistaken on what Raid was and now I can't figure out what in the world I'm supposed to do.

If it's easy as adding another hard drive to my pc and hook it up to my mobo without configuring anything in the bios then tell me, but I highly doubt that. 

And if anybody can tell me, what is raid? And what is it used for?

? · Accepted Answer

You don't need to do anything to set up the new drive, aside from installing it in the case, hooking up the power and data cables, and then formatting it.
To format it, use:
Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
RAID 0 is just two or more disks acting as one larger and faster drive.
RAID 1 is two or more drives that are mirrors of each other (if one drive fails, you have at least one mirror copy of it).
You can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels

In nearly all cases, you really want to have identical drives to set up a RAID unless you are setting up a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) array, but there isn't really any performance benefit from JBOD, especially with the capacity of modern hard drives.
Anyway, I wouldn't recommend RAID in your situation anyway, with the precipitous price drop in SSD.  You can get higher performance for similar money and with fewer headaches.

_

jlman2008 · Answer

Hi Jay,

If all you want is more storage, you can connect the new 1TB drive to a SATA connector and then clone the old drive to the new drive and then replace the old drive with the new drive. Then you'd have 1TB by itself. You can also just add the 1TB drive in and format it and use it as another logical drive... and have two independent drives.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is something totally different and you may start from scratch to accomplish this. To do RAID 0, you need two similar drives and your raid controller will stripe information across both drives so you use all your drive capacity. Maybe you first intended to use two 500GB drives for 1TB total.

RAID 1 is the set up of a mirror drive. So you require two drives still, but one drive is an exact mirror of the first drive. So two 500GB drives you'd still end up with 500GB... but you'd have a backup.

The RAID options would be set up in BIOS... but you need two drives installed of the same size.

Hope this helps,
Jeff

Anonymous · Answer

you have to go into you bios and set it up

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Question on how to add more storage to my pc?

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