Adding a 3.5in HDD

[Martrild]

I am looking at adding an additional 3.5in HDD.  Can anyone tell me if there is a limit to the size of the HDD that is supported by 690-0078a Gaming computer?

[itsmyname]

@Martrild - more than a generation ago, some motherboards supported a maximum of 4 GB, because the motherboard used 32-bit arithmetic to address each sector on the disk-drive.  Obviously, 32-bits was not enough. So, motherboards started to use more bits to address each sector. Thus, the maximum capacity of a disk-drive became 4 TB -- one thousand times larger.

So, I see that Seagate has a 4 TB disk-drive for about $200.  Do you need that much capacity? Can you afford that much money?

I see that Western Digital has:WD Blue 4TB 5400 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6GB/s 3.5 Inch Desktop Hard Disk Drive (WD40EZAZ)  for $110, but notice that it is slower than those disk-drives that spin at 7200 RPM.

It would make a good "storage" volume, but I would NOT install Windows onto it -- too slow.  Instead, I would install Windows onto a SSD, and make this volume the "D:" drive-letter, and save my files to it.

[Martrild]

I was looking at 4 TB as a minimum, the price is not an issue but I was also looking at possibly an even larger HDD 8 TB primarily as a backup for the existing SSD and HDD and that I want to upgrade the size of both of these drives and consolidate data from external and old computer HDDs.

[itsmyname]

@Martrild -- 8 TB

Well, I have never tried such a large disk-drive, but since they are being made and marketed:

    https://www.bing.com/shop?q=western+digital+8tb+internal+hard+drive

I presume that a very-recent motherboard will support such a drive, either "internal" or "external".

Note that some of the above search results are for "surveillance" disk-drives. These are "heavy-duty" disk-drives, as found inside your TV-set-top Personal Digital Video Recorders & for recording from security cameras, where there is a lot of simultaneous recording (multiple TV channels or multiple camera-feeds).