What is a
Hard Drive Upgrade?

A hard drive upgrade involves replacing an existing drive. There are two main reasons why you might want to get another drive. One is that your hard drive is running out of space and you just need more room. The second is that your hard drive is too slow and you need a faster drive. Unfortunately, if your aim is to get a faster hard disk drive, there are other issues you will need to consider.

The speed of a hard drive in a computer system is affected by two main factors. There is the transfer rate of the hard drive and there is the speed of the interface bus. It does no good to get a faster hard drive, if the hard drive interface bus will not support the full speed of the new drive. If the interface bus is the bottleneck, then you will need to get a new interface to take advantage of the faster drive. If the interface is on the motherboard, you have the choice of getting a new motherboard, a PCI adapter card, or you can just get a new computer. Usually, getting a new computer is the most satisfactory choice in this case.

If you only want more hard drive space, there a few choices you could make. You could get an external hard drive, you could add a second drive, or you could replace the smaller drive with a bigger one. For the sake of this discussion, I will assume that you want the simplicity of having a single hard drive in your computer.

Hard Drive Upgrade Steps

• Figure out your hard drive interface and get the appropriate drive. If you have an IDE drive, don’t forget to set the drive jumper.
  
  
• Copy your old smaller drive to the new drive using a hard drive clone utility. Computer technicians would likely use a hardware hard drive duplicator.
  
  
• Remove the old disk from your computer.
  
  
• Boot with the new disk to ensure that it works.
  
  

Erase the Old Disk

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