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I upgraded my system late last year but put off replacing my HDD's at that time to spare some cost. As you can see in my signature I have three different hard drives, each with a different capacity due to periodic upgrades over the past ten years. My catalog of game's and mods for the games has filled up most of my available space. Given that I have some money set aside again and I am stuck at home due to the present COVID19 situation, it seems like a good time to replace my existing drives with new ones and transfer everything to the new drives with plenty of space for expansion.

All three of my present drives are Western Digital Black's in 640GB, 1.5 TB, and 2.0 TB. My OS is on the 2TB drive and I have had no problems with any of them. I have been looking on NewEgg at some Western Digital drives, both Black and Red Pro. However I have also noticed a number of negative reviews regarding excessive sound from them while others say they are nice and quiet so I wanted some advice about the present quality of Western Digital products.

https://www.newegg.com/black-wd6003fzbx ... 000G-000W5
https://www.newegg.com/red-pro-wd6003ff ... 6822234344

Secondly, would it be better to just image the C: drive over to the new HDD or should I get an SSD to put my OS on? If the latter could I transfer the rest of my data to the new HDD's without having to reinstall several terabytes worth of programs?

If you can afford it OS and ALL programs will benefit from being on an SSD.

You definitely want to have your operating system and most-used programs on an SSD. This could be a good excuse for a nuke from orbit and re-install to get that new OS smell, but if you want to just image your OS hard-drive onto your new SSD, that works, too. I recommend Macrium Reflect for this.

Back when SSDs were expensive, you could be careful to put only the OS and most-needed stuff on a 0.12 TB SSD with the rest of your programs on a more affordable hard-drive. Now that SSDs are as cheap as $100 per TB, it's not nearly as challenging to manage.
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/inter ... 0000000000

Even a speedy M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD like the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro that I put in my latest build is less than $150 for a 1 TB SSD. The Intel 660p is the cheapest drive that checks those boxes, and it's only $120 for 1 TB. Honestly, the performance difference between a speedy SSD and a bargain SSD is not significant when you compare it to the performance chasm between a bargain SSD and a hard-disk drive.

FYI this is what Windows says my HDD's used capacity is in case that info will help. I was hoping to double my available capacity from about 3.7 TB to 8 TB. Maybe I will get an Intel 2TB 660P and a WD Red Pro 6TB.

Check out the SMR minefield in the articles linked here. For the same price as that 6 TB WD Red Pro, you could get an 8 TB Toshiba N300 (which was $185 on 3/19) or 8 TB Seagate IronWolf (which was $192 on 3/10).

I hates shingles [/Yosemite Sam].

I ordered a Intel 660p 2TB.

With regard to an 8TB HDD, I read this comment in a review by a Michael E. on NewEgg.

Because this drive exceeds the normal amount that is addressable by Windows, it must be set up as GPT. After doing that, you can create a single 8TB partition and format it as NTFS, which will allow it to be readable in Windows.

If you don't do this, you end up with several 2TB partitions with a good bit of the drive as unusable.

After doing this, it's been a great experience using this drive.

If so I am going to have to do some reading before I get that 8TB storage drive. I thought such limits were an issue with older Windows versions not Windows 10 Pro?

KJ_A wrote:

I thought such limits were an issue with older Windows versions not Windows 10 Pro?

The 2 TB limit is not due to a particular version of Windows; it's due to MBR, which is the "old" way of laying out partitions on a drive.

You're on the right track - SSD OS drive, and large-ish HDD for bulk storage.

2TB limit does not apply to Windows 7 and later. Disk just needs to be formatted GPT instead of MBR.

And yes, you want to stay away from HDDs with DM-SMR (drive-manged shingled magnetic recording) tech. As of today, some models of Seagate Barracuda Compute, WD Blue, WD Red (non-Pro), and Toshiba P300 product lines are known to be infected with shingles. Unless cost is far and away your overriding concern, SMR is to be avoided (SMR drives tend to be cheaper than their non-SMR counterparts).

Another thing to note is that even if the data files are not on the ssd because the temp files, swap file, and program files are on the ssd you will still see a large speed up for windows.

If you cannot store all of your data on the sdd don't worry.

just brew it! wrote:

2TB limit does not apply to Windows 7 and later. Disk just needs to be formatted GPT instead of MBR.

s/formatted/partitioned/ since it's nothing to do with the filesystem.

bthylafh wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

2TB limit does not apply to Windows 7 and later. Disk just needs to be formatted GPT instead of MBR.

s/formatted/partitioned/ since it's nothing to do with the filesystem.

True. I often just lump them together as a single logical operation, since they're generally done together.

Might confuse a less-experienced person since partitioning & formatting are done with separate tools.

bthylafh wrote:

Might confuse a less-experienced person since partitioning & formatting are done with separate tools.

Depends on the tool. The Windows and Linux GUI tools for disk management typically include both (though you do need to invoke them as separate steps).