Some Questions.

[jms_209]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603%2050001306%20600003269%20600003300&IsNodeId=1&name=Western%20Digital

~100$

Thanks,seems like a lot less than when I checked.
1 tb used to be $200+
Pretty sure these come with some software to move the OS over to the new drive?

I will get a new one in 3 months or so.
Prices might drop a few dollars by then.

[verz]

Hm.. just my two cents.

why not keep the OS where it is and migrate all other files to new HDD(s)?

Games don't need to be reinstalled...just copy and paste them over to new HDD and create a shortcut from the games EXE file to the desktop. Easy as pie. And theres no need to worry about file transfer speeds between internal hard drives as it's many times faster in comparison to games downloaded from cloud services such as Steam or Origin.

[Freedom Kira]

1 tb used to be $200+

Like a year and a half ago, during the big hard drive shortage due to the Thailand flood? Before the flood, the prices were around the same as they are now, so you'd be going back about five years to find drives that expensive.

[jms_209]

1 tb used to be $200+

Like a year and a half ago, during the big hard drive shortage due to the Thailand flood? Before the flood, the prices were around the same as they are now, so you'd be going back about five years to find drives that expensive.

Might of been,since I never really checked prices too much.
I got my 300gb external hard drive for around $45?
That was 3-4 years ago.

It is this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822332036

[Krudda]

Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing, must have been at least a good 5 or 6 years since you 'last checked prices'
Anyway, prices are apparently still a little high now, but where I live, that is not the case.

I can pick up a decent USB 3.0 3TB HDD for $139AU
If you don't want External, it is also very easy to take the 3.5" drive out and turn it into an internal

Good luck finding a good HDD

[jms_209]

I will need to get a 7200rpm one.
Everywhere I hear that I should get update my 5400rpm.
Since It could become a bottleneck,but since I have a laptop,it might not matter too much.

[Krudda]

Unless you plan to make it internal, get 7200, the faster it spins, the more area the head can cover per second.

If you have the money and a scsi adaptor, get a 10,000 rpm drive

[pantywraith]

7200 rpm drives are hard to find in laptop size (2.5 inch). That space (small performance drives) has been taken over by SSD's.

Most USB based drives are also 5400 rpm or less. However if all you are doing is storing anime on them, then it will not matter much. The faster speed rating helps with seeks and random read/writes. For video archives the metric you want is sequential read/write speed. Most external USB drives can handle this just fine. I have several here that I have used for this and even when playing super high bit-rate 1080p crf 13 encodes there is no problem.

If you need performance and the sizes of ssd's are to small, then you need an external enclosure that does eSATA or NAS box. Your laptop will need an eSATA port for that to work, but it is the cheapest of the two. A NAS box works best when plugged into an Gigabit Ethernet port, but WiFi will work in a pinch. You can get all of these at Newegg, but good quality NAS boxes will run you as much or more than a new laptop.

[Krudda]

Whoa CRF 13, somebody is doing something wrong, you should never need to go below 15.

Anyway, I would like to know your source about USB HDDs mostly being 5400rpm, every single external I own (thats a lot) have 7200's in them.

[megido-rev.M]

Some lower grade internal HDDs are 5400rpm as well, fyi.

[Bozobub]

Hm.. just my two cents.

why not keep the OS where it is and migrate all other files to new HDD(s)?

Games don't need to be reinstalled...just copy and paste them over to new HDD and create a shortcut from the games EXE file to the desktop. Easy as pie. And theres no need to worry about file transfer speeds between internal hard drives as it's many times faster in comparison to games downloaded from cloud services such as Steam or Origin.

BEWARE: Some games will work if their installation folder is simply moved, rather than a full un/reinstall, but many will not!  It greatly depends on whether or not the game has registry entries that specify file locations.  Now, you can search the registry for the game's folder name, to find any keys that need to be changed, but I definitely do not recommend this unless you damn well know what you are doing; you can quite literally break Windows with a bad regedit.  Just try each moved game; if it works, it doesn't need a regedit.  If a regedit doesn't fix a game, it's very likely an .ini or some other ancillary file in the game folder also has a reference to the old location.

Some lower grade internal HDDs are 5400rpm as well, fyi.

Such as WD Greens.

If you want SSD performance with HD capacity, you may want to check out the Seagate Momentus hybrid SSD/HDs (Note: the hybrid version only comes in the 500 GB size currently, AFAIK).