Install secondary hard disk




















Size: In general, laptops use 2. Thickness: The last factor is thickness. The early 2. A thinner hard drive can fit in a deeper bay. On the contrary, a thicker hard drive can seldom fit in a shallow bay.

After you buy a proper hard drive, you can refer to the following tutorials to install it in a laptop or a desktop. For those who want to know how to install a new hard drive or how to install SSD in PC, these tutorials are also worth reference. Step 1: In the similar way, remove the computer bottom cover to find the hard drive bay. Step 2: Use a cross screwdriver to screw the screws, fastening the hard drive in the hard drive bracket.

Step 3: Insert the hard drive into the slot and screw the screws to fasten the bracket with the hard drive in it into the computer. Step 2: Unscrew the two fasteners shown in the following picture to remove the optical drive tray. Step 3: Fasten the second hard drive into a hard drive caddy tray for optical drive slot. Step 4: Remove the baffle from the optical drive tray and install it on the hard drive caddy tray. Step 5: Insert the hard drive caddy tray into the optical drive bay and screw the two fasteners unscrewed previously.

Step 2: Remove the front cover of the chassis by unscrewing two fasteners shown in the following picture, and then nudging the cover to the side. Step 3: Remove the hard drive bracket from the chassis and fasten the hard drive into it. Step 5: Plug in the power and data lines, with one end into the hard drive and the other end into the slot built in the chassis.

After physically installing a second hard drive, you may wonder how to install it in Windows For that, you should initialize the hard drive, create new partitions, and format the new partitions. Step 2: For the newly installed hard drive, the system will automatically pop up the prompt to initialize it.

The pop-up window looks like the following one. Try solutions here to fix it. Step 1: Right-click the black unallocated space and choose New Simple Volume.

Follow the wizard to create a new partition. Step 2: Right-click the new partition to choose Format. Then, uncheck Perform a quick format to run a full format, which will automatically check the hard drive to fix some errors.

This article explains quick format, full format and the difference between them. It also touches upon the problems: how to recover data from quick formatted disk, and how to make data unrecoverable. You can also complete the above process through MiniTool Partition Wizard. It is a professional partition management software. How to get to Disk Management Windows 10 for disk or partition management? This post shows you much on disk management Windows Yes No.

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Download Article Explore this Article methods. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. Make sure that you have a Windows desktop computer. Generally speaking, modern laptops do not have the space for a second hard drive. Additionally, modern Mac computers—both desktop and laptop versions—don't have room for a second hard drive.

Buy a SATA internal hard drive for your computer. If you don't already have a SATA hard drive that you want to install, buy one before proceeding. You'll generally want to buy a hard drive made by the same company which made your computer e. Some hard drives aren't compatible with certain computers. Before buying a hard drive for your computer, search for your computer's model and the hard drive's name e. Turn off and unplug your computer.

You should never attempt to alter your computer's internal components while the computer is running, as you may seriously harm both yourself and the computer. Some desktop computers will take a couple of minutes to finish running after unplugging them. If this is the case for your computer, wait until the computer's fans have stopped running before proceeding. Open your computer's case. This process will vary from desktop computer to desktop computer, so consult your computer's manual or online documentation for specific instructions if you don't already know how to open the case.

You'll usually need a Phillips-head screwdriver for this step. This will prevent accidental damage to your computer's sensitive internal parts e. Find an empty mounting space. Your primary hard drive will be mounted in a rack that's somewhere in the computer's case; there should be a similar, empty rack near the hard drive. This is where your second hard drive will go.

Slide your second hard drive into the mounting space. It should fit under or next to the primary hard drive, with the cable side of the hard drive facing you. In some cases, you'll have to tighten the mounting space with screws. Find the hard drive attachment point. Follow the current hard drive's cable all the way down to where it plugs into the motherboard, which is a green panel with circuits on it.

If the hard drive's cable resembles a ribbon, your current hard drive is an IDE-type hard drive; you'll most likely need an adapter to plug the second hard drive into the motherboard. Attach your second hard drive. Make sure that one end of the second hard drive's cable is firmly plugged into the second hard drive, then plug the other end of the cable into the motherboard.

It should fit into a slot next to the primary hard drive's cable. If your computer's motherboard only supports IDE connections, the slot on the motherboard will be a couple of inches wide. You can buy a SATA to IDE adapter that plugs into this slot, at which point you can plug your hard drive's cable into the adapter's back.

Attach the second hard drive to the power supply. Plug one end of the second hard drive's power cable into the power supply box, then plug the other end into your second hard drive. You'll usually find the power supply at the top of the computer case. The power supply cable resembles a wider SATA cable. Make sure that all of the connections are tight. If your second hard drive isn't properly plugged in, your computer won't be able to recognize it later.

Plug in and turn back on the computer. Now that your second hard drive is physically installed, you'll need to allow Windows to recognize the hard drive. Open the Disk Management window. Wait for the "Initialize Disk" window to appear. This window will usually appear within a few seconds of opening Disk Management.

If the "Initialize Disk" window doesn't appear, click the grey "Refresh" button that's above the Layout tab near the top of the window. Click OK when prompted. This will allow Windows to initialize the second hard drive. Once this process completes, you can proceed.

Make your second hard drive usable. Right-click the second hard drive's name, click New Simple Volume Your hard drive will be set up and made readable by Windows. Once this process completes, you'll be able to access your second hard drive from the This PC app. By doing so, you'll get several volumes that share equal capacity on the disk, for example, 2 GB volumes on a GB disk.

After creating volumes on the new disk, you may stop here. But if you need to make use of the hard drive, follow the next guide for help. Here, we collected two types of needs and offered respective tips to help you make use of the second hard disk. If you tend to use the second hard drive as a data disk, you can now copy and paste large files into the second disk.

For honing the best way to transfer large files, EaseUS Todo PCTrans now update the large file cleanup function, supporting moving files large than 20MB to another drive partition root and custom directories. See how does it work. Note that if your OS drive is logically too small, the other way to release its stress is to move the installed programs to a second hard drive.

On this page, we offered a complete guide, showing you the complete process of adding a new second disk on your Windows computer:.

To simplify the whole process, we applied EaseUS partition manager software - Partition Master to help you initialize the disk and partition it in a quick guide. If you are experienced in setting up computers and manage hard drives, you can also apply disk management to make it show up on the computer.

In a word, installing and setting up a new disk on your computer is not complex. Follow this DIY guide to optimize your computer performance now. It makes it way easier to play out what will happen after you've made all the changes.



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