Non-Raid an option?

[BioInclined]

Looking to add a 1TB drive or so the a friends PC. I would think it's as simple as plug and play into the SATA port, but, in BIOS will i have to ensure the drive with the OS is set to boot first?
I know RAID would be great but he is not into anything crazy, just needs music and movie storage space and maybe a few more games.
I searched here but i get a lot of 2004-2006 results talking about "slave", "IDE", etc.
I'd rather not have to bother to transfer OS and files.
Thanks guys
Not sure if it matters, but he currently has a WD Caviar Black and i am not sure of what drive i'm going to pick up for him yet.

 

[Old Hippie]

Plug the drive into the MB and boot.

After that you'll probably hafta go into Disk Management to format the drive and give it a letter.

Easy Peasy.

 

[Cmustang87]

Worst case scenario - You have to enable the other SATA ports in the BIOS.

Best case scenario - you hook it up and power the system on. And you now have 1TB more of space.

 

[BioInclined]

appreciate it guys, i didn't/couldn't think of there being any major instances to handle.

 

[BioInclined]

Hitachi
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145520

Samsung
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185

What do you think of these 2? Something reliable would be nice, I do notice more people are not happy with the WD Black so i was going to go a less "common" route.

 

[drescherjm]

Something reliable would be nice

There is no way to guess that. Drives from every manufacturer will die at any time between before your purchased it to its 5 year life expectancy and beyond.

Currently at work (for the last 2.5 years or so) where I have 200 or so drives we are seeing the top end of googles expected 2% to 8% annual failure rate. See figure 2 on page 4.

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

My advice is to not take chances with reliability and make regular backups of your data.