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J

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July 10th, 2004 12:00

Swapping internal hard drives Question

I was considering reformatting my hard drive to clean it up and have a fresh start for school, but I just had the idea that i could just buy a new internal hard drive and swap it with the current one and just format the new one and use it for school and when I needed to get access to the programs on the old drive I could just switch them.  

I thought I would provide a few reasons to help explain why i want to do this.  I have a rather large program installed right now that I need for my business and it would be a PITA to have to reinstall since there is about 2 GB of online updates that I would need to dowload again not to mention just getting the program installed will take time and effort.

The other motivation for this is that I dont want to just reclutter my hard drive right after I reformat so i thought it would be slick to keep this one the way it is and have the new one relatively clear.

I am looking here for any thoughts anyone has about this idea: good or bad.

I have a i8500 right now with a 40 GB HD and I was just lloking at getting a 30 GB HD from DELL for about $116. nothing special.

Thanks

9 Legend

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87.5K Posts

July 10th, 2004 14:00

You can easily do this.  What you'll probably want to do is buy a new drive and a new caddy for it, so you can swap the drives with the removal of a single screw.  Without a second caddy, you can still swap drives, but it will take more time - undoing more screws and a connector, and reversing the process every time you want to swap the drives back.

The caddies cost about $15-20 - try Dell spare parts (call) or www.parts-people.com.

You can easily buy a 40G drive for less than what Dell is quoting for a 30 -- try www.newegg.com.

 

July 11th, 2004 18:00

Thanks for the links: I got a drive form newegg, but ended up getting the caddy off ebay.  Thanks for the caddy tip too, I would have just done it the hard way had you not suggested it, and with the frequency that I plan on swapping drives I will certainly need it.
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