Replacing hard drive in Z220 workstation

[Ruthieroo]

I was helpfully advised by someone here that replacing my five year old computer's hard drive may help to speed it up a bit. I've decided to go with either a Seagate Barracuda or Seagate Firecuda. The issue I'm having is that although I think I have a fairly good idea how I'd take out the existing hard drive and put the new one in it's place, and I have all of my files backed up and programmes could be reinstalled, I'd rather somehow transfer everything as is from my current drive to the new one as I have no idea how I'd reinstall the OS etc.

I did think about installing the new HD and then finding some way to transfer from the old one to the new one but I am hesitant about delving into the as yet untouched bundle of cables to find the right things to connect it. I've looked at external cables and read up on how to 'mirror' my old drive to the new one (I think that's what it's called) but I am feeling a bit daunted as I don't seem to be quite able to grasp what to do and how to do it...

OS wise, on the subject of installing it, I've had Windows 10 sitting on my desktop for a while and am just installing it now as I know I need to do it at some point really. My computer came with Windows 7 and I have all of the disks that came with it, so presumably if it all went wrong I could install Windows 7 again, but I guess then I'd have lost my download of Windows 10...

Apologies for such a hopeless sounding post, I like to think I'm fairly practical and I'm interested in learning how to do this but am afraid of breaking something, so any tips or advice would be much appreciated! Thank you so much

[wb2001]

@Ruthieroo,

What you would do is "clone" the original hard drive to a new hard drive.

Go to Seagate to download the manual and program.

Seagate offers their free Seagate Disk Wizard cloning software and manual. (see page 44 for step by step).

A 1TB drive is all you need. The Firecuda is hybrid drive,, and outperforms the Barracuda.

Barracuda 3.5" drive is 1 yr warranty

Firecuda 3.5" drive is 5 year warranty

[Ruthieroo]

Oh that's fab thank you so much, I had downloaded some other cloning software but would rather go with the Seagate one.

I went for a 2TB Barracuda in the end with a 256MB cache (assuming and hoping the larger cache would help with speed/ performance) I thought as I'd had a Barracuda before and as it was a little cheaper I'd go for that. I've got a SATA cable too and located the power cable (easier than I thought) so I am hoping I will be able to install it and clone the old dive successfully. Hopefully it'll be arriving this afternoon.

I've also upgraded to Windows 10 (thank you for mentioning that in response to my previous post 🙂 ) and updated Photoshop, it turned out I was still using the 2017 version, and I think doing both of those things has helped speed things up a bit. It's a bit of a learning curve getting used to Windows 10! I'm very grateful for the HD advice, I didn't ever really think about the implications of a HD failiure (I have files backed up but not programmes/ OS) so I think when this one is installed I may purchase another smaller one at some stage and clone the other one so I've always got a backup if there's a problem.

Many thanks!