Dual Hard Drives

[Samoasila]

To begin, please forgive my novice understanding of the issue and system accompanying my

dilemma and know that I sincerely appreciate any assistance you can lend.

The following represents a list of the relevant, and perhaps irrelevant hardware contained within my system. As well, to the best of my ability I have listed the issue recently encountered and data available to me at this time.

Issue: LOW DISK SPACE WARNING

Hardware

• 32GB DDR4-2133 DIMM (4X8GB) RAM
• 512GB SATA 2.5 1ST SOLID STATE DRIVE [Windows C:] (46.1gb FREE SPACE)
• 3TB 7200RPM SATA - 6G 2ND HARD DRIVE [Local Disk E:] (2.37tb FREE SPACE)
• INTEL CORE i7 - 6700K processor quadcore
• NVIDIA GF GTX 980Ti 6GB GDDR5 FH GFX

When I purchased the system it was my, clearly misunderstood interpretation that the 3TB hard drive could be designated as the "master" hard drive and that the 512GB drive could be utilized for additional storage. I am now faced with the quandary of low disk space.

Naturally, my questions is whether or not it is possible to "switch" the operation of these two drives to increase the resources (and performance) of my system.

Can anyone help me with this issue?

Appreciate any help!

[WAWood]

@Samoasila

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

Your system is configured to use the SSD as the OS "drive" and the HDD as a data "drive" -- which is really how you want it to be set up for best performance.  If we define performance as how fast the PC appears to operate (i.e., how responsive it is) then swapping the usage of these drives is only going to seriously LOWER the performance of your PC.

Why?

Because then, you will have the OS and all the apps loading from the slower HDD instead of the faster SSD.  You will most definitely notice how much slower is will then appear to function.

Did your PC come preinstalled with Win10, or did you do an upgrade from a prior OS?

There are things you can do to recover space on the SSD and to use the HDD as the default storage location.

We can proceed when you provide the information.

Thanks

[Samoasila]

Thank you for the quick reply!

My system came pre-installed with Win 10.

[WAWood]

OK, thanks.  If your system was Upgraded from a prior OS to Win10, there would have been cleanup work you could have done to recovery some of the space used by the Upgrade.

Here are a couple of threads you should work through in order to see how much space you can recovery on the SSD:

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/3012-disk-cleanup-open-use-windows-10-a.html

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-clean-up-winsxs-folder-in-windows-10/

If that doesn't provide enough free space -- then you COULD consider swapping the drives, but that is going to involve a lot of work, consisting of the following:

1)  Offloading stuff from the HDD to get the used space well down below the capacity of the SSD

2) Obtain an external drive of at least 500GB to serve as a temporary drive

3) Connect this new drive migrate the used contents of the HDD to it. Now you have the contents of the HDD saved offline.

4) Download and install this partitioning tool:  http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html (NOTE: While you CAN do all the partitioning using Disk Management, this tool is much more flexible)

5) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR).  You will be using this to "clone" the OS information from the SDD to the HDD.

6) Follow the instructions in this link, selecting the HDD as the target drive: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk

7) When done shutdown your PC. Disconnect the SSD.

😎 Reboot your PC with only the HDD connected -- it should boot OK.  

At this point, you have "migrated" the OS from the SSD to the HDD.  

You will only have the partitions formerly from the SSD now resident on the HDD, so you can now decide what you want to do regarding enlarging them or adding any.

Now, shutdown the PC and reconnect the SSD.

When you reboot, since you now have two bootable drives, make sure you select the HDD, not the SSD

Now, use the Minitool app to repartition the SSD into a single data partition (NTFS).

You've now swapped the drives.

Good Luck