That kind of bloat would cause an uproar if the sizes of
commercially available hard disks weren??™t growing at an even faster rate.
Luckily, a new drive is an inexpensive way to improve performance as well
as get more space for your stuff. And there are basically two approaches:
Add a second drive. Hard drive manufacturers sell a lot of external USB
drives for this purpose. It??™s the easiest approach, taking only a few minutes
to hook up, but it does very little to improve performance. Why
run Windows on an aging 60 GB drive, while your photos sit happily on
a much faster 500 GB drive?
Replace the primary drive. Use this approach if you want to throw away
that old 60 GB drive, and use only the 500 GB drive for Windows and
all your data. Not only will this give you better performance, you??™ll have
a lot less to worry about if you??™re running Windows on a new drive
rather than one that??™s seen thousands of hours of use. The downside is
that it??™s more work to completely replace your old drive, and that??™s
what this section is about.
Thanks to improvements in technology, rapidly dropping prices of new hard
disks, and a nifty new tool in Windows Vista, it??™s easier than ever to replace
your old hard disk.
The procedure goes like this: first, connect your new drive to your PC alongside
your old drive. Then, create an image of your old hard disk??”a snapshot
of every byte of data on the entire drive??”and write the image to your
new hard disk.
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