Hard Drive replacement
If you've been collecting music, movies, and pictures on your computer, one day you might need a new hard drive.
One sign that you could need a new hard drive is if you hear ticking or horrible grinding sounds coming from your computer. It’s going to be time for some serious computer repairs.
Today’s large multimedia files can fill up a hard drive fast! iTunes, movies, and picture collections can quickly take up large amounts of space. What used to be in the family photo album just a decade ago is now frequently housed on the family computer (You ARE backing up family photos somewhere, aren’t you? If not, please talk to us now to forever protect all those family memories).
With all that digital media, it’s important to have a fast reliable hard drive with enough space to handle your needs and room to spare. We can do a couple things when it comes to hard drive replacement:
- Clone your existing hard drive to a new hard drive
- Add in a second drive to provide storage for all your multimedia files
“Cloning” is the process of making a bit by bit copy of your old hard drive directly onto a new hard drive. That ensures that no data is lost and the new hard drive should be able to just be plugged right in and work seamlessly! If you’ve had a hard drive failure, check out our data recovery page. In those cases, the replacement process is not so clear. New operating system install is required and disk recovery will be required IF you have data on that drive that you wish to recover. Even then, it is and can be very hit or miss. But when the data is just cloned to a new drive from a working drive, you will end up with an exact duplicate of your drive.
hard drives fill up fast.
Hard Drive Replacement is Painless
As long as you haven’t had a hard drive failure, hard drive replacement is painless. There are advantages and disadvantages to both options. We can clone your existing drive to a new larger and faster drive and everything will remain pretty much the same as far as user experience. Your documents and pictures will still be exactly where Windows wants you to have them. You can keep your old drive as a backup somewhere safe if desired or it can be wiped and reused if desired.
Add in a Supplementary Hard Drive
We can also just add in a second hard drive to your system to provide additional storage space to keep your “My Documents” folders and files – or even just your multimedia collection. A little reconfiguring in the operating system and files can be automatically stored over there on the second drive. This has the benefit of speeding up some access to those files. If you do work with multimedia files such as movie editing or creation, this is a good option. By keeping two different hard drives, not all of the work is being performed on the primary drive – you’ll experience better disk access and read times. Got questions? Ask us at Buckeye PC Computer Service!
External Hard Drives
However it is approached, if you’ll have a disk left at the end of the process, we can also take that disk and put it into an external case for you with a USB connection. You can then use it to do backups, keep archive copies of your important files, and more. If the disk is left intact after cloning it to a new hard drive, you can just keep it as a backup. We always suggest keeping backups of your important files. We also suggest that you keep at least one backup off-site – meaning somewhere else.
We always like to think that bad things don’t happen, but far too often bad things can and DO happen. Even if you’re diligent about keeping great backups, an external drive next to your computer is great to take and run with in case of a catastrophic event such as a home fire, tornado, or hurricane. Home computer users, like business computer users, can never have too much protection from data loss. External hard drives are a great backup option to have.
Protect all of Your Data!
If you’d like more information about protecting yourself from computer data loss with backup solutions, feel free to give us a shout and talk with us! Hard drive repairs?
