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July 14th, 2017 14:00
What Size Internal Hard Drive to Buy
Hi. I have a Dell XPS 8700 with a 2TB hard drive which is about full. There is room in the machine to add an additional hard drive but I am not sure how large I can go that will still work with the machine. I am thinking of 6TB or 8TB (in addition to, or as a replacement for, the current hard drive). My understanding is that I would need to get a 3.5mm SATA drive that is 6Gb/s but I am not sure what spin speed to get. Does this need to be the same spin speed as the current hard drive? What are the pros and cons of the higher and lower spin speeds? How big of a drive can I get? Will this cause a problem with the computer if I use the the new internal hard drive plus the old internal hard drive that together total a lot of internal storage? Thanks!
beamermt79
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2.3K Posts
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July 14th, 2017 17:00
Hello! So basically you can get whatever size you want, however you may be limited through the BIOS in terms of if you need to partition the drive into multiple drives or not. I believe the 8700 uses a standard BIOS so anything above a 2TB drive would have to be partitioned into 2 or more drives. As for spin speed, the faster the better. The most common ones are 5.4k and 7.2k. I think the bigger the size of the drive, you get stuck at 5.4 because the data is packed tightly on the drive itself.
speedstep
11 Legend
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47K Posts
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July 19th, 2017 09:00
Installing hard drives as the boot volume larger than 2TB is not for mere mortals. SSD's up to 2TB are the best option. 2.5 inch drives are easily converted to 3.5 with a silverstone SDP09 adapter.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049MPQDG
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071KGS72Q
Dan-H
6 Operator
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1.2K Posts
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July 19th, 2017 17:00
Boot drives larger than 2TB is not that hard.
-> :
Win 7 SP1 64 bit. or Win8/81 64bit or Win10 64bit OS.
UEFI support and enabled. ( which the 8700 has )
Format the drive GPT
Install Windoze
The hardest part is reformatting the drive GPT if it was originally formatted MBR.
technet.microsoft.com/.../cc725671(v=ws.11).aspx
jfmy787
1 Rookie
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95 Posts
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July 19th, 2017 23:00
I have several dell optiplex towers amd I use the following for more room for my data , games ,and videos.
www.newegg.com/.../Product.aspx
I also only use 2tb hard drives so my winxp machine can use them also. 4 per box 3 boxes. You can also get an 8 drive model.
whats neat about these it is just like having your stuff inside the machine. only problem is i had to upgrade the dells with a usb 3 card for faster transfer. But if speed of transfer is not an issue then right out of trhe box works. Been using this for about 2 years now.