1. Format Hdd After Installing Ssd Drive
2. Format Hdd After Installing Ssd 2tb
3. Ssd Hdd Combo
4. Format Hdd After Installing Ssd Windows 7
5. Windows 10 Ssd Hdd Configuration
6. Ssd And Hdd Drives

If your laptop has only one hard drive bay, you may have two options to install the new hard drive or SSD drive. Add 2nd HDD/SSD to Laptop By Replacing DVD or Blu-ray Drive. Here, we found a detailed and useful video tutorial that can help you effectively add the second hard drive or SSD to the laptop by replacing DVD or Blu-ray drive. Solid-state drives are now the best option to use in most computers. It’s fast, lightweight, and makes use of flash memory, making it less likely to wear down, unlike hard disk drives. If you’ve currently changed your laptop’s drive to an SSD but it won’t show on your computer, you may need to initialize it first. Initialize SSD/Hard Drive. Jun 09, 2020 Why format SSD? An SSD stands for 'Solid State Drive'. It’s a type of disk which stores mediums in the computer. Compared with traditional hard disk, it has many advantages. Like a hard disk, an SSD must be divided into one or more partitions to store data. Thus, formatting an SSD also means formatting SSD partition. With the new storage now installed, turn the PC on and let it boot into windows as normal. The new drive won’t be usable until we activate it. Press/Click the windows key and type in ‘partition’ then press enter/click. This will make the ‘create and format hard disk partitions’ tool pop up.

In the following, you'll learn a complete guide on how to install and set up a new regular hard drive or SSD on Windows 10/8/7 computer. If you are looking for a detailed tutorial, follow through this page to make the new drive work on your PC or laptop now.

Part 1. Choose Your New Hard Drive

If you have bought a new hard drive home, you may directly skip this part and jump to the next part to install the new hard drive or SSD.

If you haven't yet chosen a suitable drive, here below are some critical factors that may help you to decide which drive you would like to apply and install on your computer - a regular hard drive or an SSD disk.

1. The Price

If you don't plan to offer too much money on purchasing a new disk, a regular hard drive will be your best shot. Compared to a regular hard drive, we know that although recently the price of SSD disk indeed goes down, yet a solid-state disk is still charging regular people quite a bunch of bucks.

2. Your Purpose

Another important factor that may affect your decision is to make clear about your purpose of installing a new drive - to Migrate OS or Increase Storage Capacity.

If your computer system performance degrades, your system hard drive is old, you will need to upgrade the system disk. Your wise choice is to get a new SSD disk.

If your computer hard drive is out of space for saving data, you will need to add a second hard drive into your computer as a data drive. In this case, all you need is a regular hard drive with enough storage capacity.

3. The SATA Interface

Usually, the number of SATA Interfaces on the motherboard of your computer decides how many hard drives that you can add to your computer.

If your computer or laptop only has a pair of SATA interfaces, we are very sorry that you can only install only one disk. It means that you will need to purchase a new and bigger drive to install on your PC:

• For less money with a bigger space, a normal hard drive is your best choice.
• For faster speed with bigger space, an SSD is for you.

You may refer to this link for more details between SSD and HDD: HDD vs SSD.

Part 2. Install New Drive to PC or Laptop

After getting the new hard drive or new SSD home, you may now follow through this part to install it on your PC or laptop.

Tools You Need

Here is a preparation list of tools that you will need for installing the new disk on your PC or laptop:

• A screwdriver
• The new drive - a regular hard drive or SSD
• A SATA connection cable

Steps to Install The New Drive

As you know that due to the different designs of desktop and laptop, the ways to install a new hard drive are also dissimilar to some extent. Follow through the detailed steps and install the new disk on your computer now.

Install New Drive on Desktop:

Here, we will take a 2TB hard drive as an example to show you the full process of installing it into a desktop computer.

Step 1. Shut down your computer and take the new drive out of the drive case or box.

Step 2. Prepare the new drive.

If it's a new hard drive, remove the screws on both sides of this disk.

And slide the drive bays into the screw holes on both sides of the new drive.

If it's an SSD, you will need to add a special mounting slot or a drive adapter to fit in 3.5 slots with screws like this:

Step 3. Remove the desktop computer case.

If it's locked by screws, remove them with your screwdriver.

Step 4. Slide your new drive into the computer case next to your old drive.

Step 5. Connect the new drive to your computer motherboard with the SATA cable and plug in a power cable to power on the drive.

Step 6. Close up your computer case and reboot it.

Install New Drive on Laptop:

As you know that some new laptops support to add two or more hard drives. However, most old laptops or some slim new laptops have only one hard drive bay.

If your laptop has another hard drive bay, you may easily insert the new drive in and make it work for you.

If your laptop has only one hard drive bay, you may have two options to install the new hard drive or SSD drive.

Option 1. Add 2nd HDD/SSD to Laptop By Replacing DVD or Blu-ray Drive

Here, we found a detailed and useful video tutorial that can help you effectively add the second hard drive or SSD to the laptop by replacing DVD or Blu-ray drive:

Source from: YouTube; By: Michael Cooper.

Option 2. Replace Old Drive with New Drive on Laptop

This video shows you the process to replace old laptop hard drive with an SSD:

As for the mentioned system clone tool, you may follow this link to download EaseUS Todo Backup for help.

Part 3. Set Up New Drive in Windows 10/8/7

After installing the new drive on your laptop, you may now move to the next part to set up your hard drive, making it work for you.

To save your time and energy, we'd like to recommend a reliable partition manager software to help you effectively initialize disk and partition hard drive with ease.

Go through the next two stages to make the new drive work for you:

# 1. Initialize Disk to MBR or GPT

Assume that the installed new drive is now unallocated on your computer or laptop, you'll need to initialize it first.

EaseUS Partition Master will help you make your new hard drive readable in only 3 steps:

Step 1: Download the software

Download EaseUS Partition Master. Connect the hard drive or SSD to PC.

Format Hdd After Installing Ssd Drive

Step 2: Initialize your HDD/SSD

Right-click the target HDD or SSD and select 'Initialize to MBR' or 'Initialize to GPT' accordingly.

Fig 1. Initialize to MBR:

Fig 2. Initialize to GPT:

Step 3: Apply the operation

A pending operation of initializing disk to MBR or GPT disk will be added. Execute the operation and click 'Apply'.

# 2. Make Use of The New Hard Drive

If you plan to upgrade your system disk to the new drive, you may apply EaseUS Partition Master with its Migrate OS to HDD/SSD feature for help:

If you plan to make the second hard drive as a data disk, you may apply the partition hard drive feature in this software to create new partitions with ease:

Step 1: Launch EaseUS Partition Master

On the main window, right-click on the unallocated space on your hard drive or external storage device and select 'Create'.

Step 2: Adjust the new partition size, file system, label, etc.

Set the size, partition label, drive letter, file system, etc. for the new partition and click 'OK' to continue.

Step 3: Confirm to create a new partition

Click on the 'Execute Operation' button and confirm to create a new partition by clicking 'Apply'.

FAQs About Install A New Hard Drive

Some of you may still have questions on installing a new hard drive to Desktop or Laptop. Here we gathered 5 top concerned questions and listed a brief answer to help you.

1. How do I set up a new hard drive?

First, use Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master as shown in Part 3 on this page to initialize the new hard drive.

Next, you may use Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master to create new partitions for usage.

For upgrading the system disk, you may follow Migrate OS to SSD as a guide.

2. How do I install a new hard drive in Windows 10?

The process is similar to the provided process on this page:

• Prepare new hard drive, screwdriver, SATA cable > Shut down the computer
• Remove computer or laptop case > Insert the new hard drive
• Reboot PC and initialize hard drive > Partition hard drive or migrate OS with EaseUS Partition Master.

For a detailed guide, follow up provided guidelines on this page.

3. How to format a new hard drive?

When you first install a new hard drive, if it's not initialized, the computer may not be able to detect it.

So your first job is to open Disk Management, locate and right-click on the new hard drive, select to initialize it. Then you can create partitions on it by right-clicking on the unallocated space and select to create new simple volumes.

After this, you can format the new hard drive by right-clicking to format the created partitions.

4. What to do after installing a new hard drive?

After you install a new hard drive, you may initialize it first in using Disk Management or partition manager software like EaseUS Partition Master recommended here.

Then you need to re-think your purpose of installing this drive.

Format Hdd After Installing Ssd 2tb

• To extend storage capacity, you can create new partitions on the drive and move your data to the new disk.
• To upgrade the system disk, you will need to transfer the system to the new disk by using EaseUS Partition Master or other system migration tools.

5. How to use the old hard drive as a second data drive?

• First, you need to install a new hard drive on your computer or laptop. For a detailed guide, follow-through steps in Part 2 on this page.
• Next, migrate the system to the new hard drive by following the system migration video on this page in Part 3.
• Last, Reboot computer from the new hard drive by changing BIOS boot sequence and then use Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master to delete old system drive, creating new partitions on the old drive to save data.

Summary :

Do you know how to setup SSD and HDD Windows 10 to make your computer gain the best performance? If you don't know, don't worry. This article will show you the ways and some useful tips for SSD and HDD setup Windows 10.

Nowadays, many users want to upgrade their HDD to SSD or install SSD and HDD together on their machine for better user experience and computer performance. However, many users don't know how to install SSD and HDD together or how to setup SSD and HDD combo Windows 10.

For users who are not computer savvy, they may feel that it is complicated and it’s the job for the professional.

Actually, it is not so difficult to complete SSD and HDD setup by yourself. If you are a fresh hand and don't know how to setup SSD and HDD Windows 10 or how to use SSD and HDD together, you can follow the detailed steps and screenshots in this article. You will find that SSD and HDD setup is very simple.

How to Setup SSD and HDD Windows 10

How to setup SSD and HDD combo Windows 10? As we all know, SSD uses flash memory to store data. Since it has no moving mechanical components, it is less likely to get damaged and enjoys great reliability.

More importantly, it offers better performance than HDD. A PC using SSD as boot drive will boot faster, run computer programs faster, and transfer files faster. Considering the above reasons, it is recommended to setup SSD as boot drive.

As for HDD, it offers larger capacity than an SSD. And its price is inexpensive. So you can choose the HDD as the storage option. So, if you want to enjoy both of the high performance provided by SSD and the large capacity of HDD, you can set SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage drive. And it is also the SSD and HDD setup for gaming.

Well, how to setup SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage drive? If you have used the HDD as the boot drive and the SSD is new, you can do the OS migration to setup SSD as boot drive. If you do not want to use the old operating system, you can perform a clean install on your SSD.

If you don't know the detailed steps to finish OS migration and system reinstallation, you can follow the steps as below.

Setup SSD as Boot Drive and HDD as Storage

To setup SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage, you need to install your operating system and frequently used software on SSD, and save all your personal files including pictures, videos, music, and documents to the HDD. It is also the perfect SSD and HDD setup for gaming.

Here are two ways that can help you setup SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage drive. If you don't know how to install SSD with existing HDD, you can read the following content.

Migrate Your OS to SSD with MiniTool Partition Wizard

MiniTool Partition Wizard is an all-in-one partition manager. It can help you manage SSD and HDD on your computer in an effortless way with its features like extend partition, resize partition, convert MBR to GPT, align partition, surface test, wipe disk and so on.

In addition, its Migrate OS to SSD/HD feature is perfect for you to setup SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage. You can try this feature to finish SSD and HDD setup in Windows 10.

Using MiniTool Partition Wizard to migrate OS to SSD, you can use your old operating system directly and all the programs installed on your computer will be copied to your SSD drive (if you install programs on the C drive).

Kindly Remind: To migrate OS from MBR disk to GPT disk is not allowed in MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition. You need to upgrade to MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro and its above versions. And to boot from GPT disk successfully, your motherboard should support UEFI. SEE: UEFI vs. BIOS – What’s the Differences and Which One Is Better

Ssd Hdd Combo

Before you try the following methods, you can install the SSD into your desktop computer firstly. You can check if your SSD can be detected in Disk Management after the SSD installation.

Here I use MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate Edition to migrate OS to SSD for demonstration.

Step 1. Launch the program.

1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard.
2. Click Migrate OS to SSD/HD on the main interface.

Step 2. Migrate your OS only.

1. Choose a method to migrate OS and then click Next.

• If you would like to replace the system disk with SSD completely, choose the first mode.
• If you would like to migrate Windows OS to SSD only, choose the second to copy the system required partitions to the SSD.

Here since you want to setup SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage drive, you can just migrate system related partitions to SSD only.

2. Choose a destination disk and click Next. Then click Yes on the pop-up window to go on.

3. Review the changes you are going to make. Then click Next.

• Align partitions to 1MB could help to improve performance for SSD and advanced format disks.
• Use GUID Partition Table for the target disk option allows users to use all space of hard disk larger than 2TB, and UEFI boot should be enabled in BIOS. However, this is a paid feature.

4. This page tells you how to boot from the new disk. Read the note and click Finish.

Step 3. Apply the operation.

Click Apply on the upper left corner to allow the pending operations.

Then you can change BIOS boot order to boot from the SSD drive.

Format Hdd After Installing Ssd Windows 7

You see, you can migrate OS to SSD/HDD in just a few clicks with MiniTool Partition Wizard. Don’t know how to how to setup SSD and HDD Windows 10? Get MiniTool Partition Wizard to complete SSD and HDD setup now!

If you want to resize SSD partition after system migration, you can perform the operation with the freeware MiniTool Partition Wizard. If you find that your SSD freezes sometimes after the SSD and HDD setup, you can perform SSD alignment to align SSD partition.

Install Windows 10 on the NewSSD

Of course, system migration is not the only method to setup SSD as boot drive and HDD as storage. If you don't want to continue with the old operating system, you can perform a clean install of Windows 10 with Windows Media Creation Tool, though it might be a little complicated and time-consuming.

You can follow the steps as below to install Windows 10 on a new hard drive (with pictures).

Step 1. Create Windows 10 installation media bootable drive.

You can utilize Windows Media Creation Tool to create a Windows 10 installation USB drive/DVD disc to perform a clean install or to repair an unbootable PC in an effortless way.

Prepare a USB drive and connect it to your computer. (Make sure there is no important file on the USB drive.)

1. Download Windows 10 Media Creation Tool from Microsoft's official website.

2. Run the tool and on the What do you want to do page, select Create installation media (USB flash drive, DVD, or ISO file) for another PCand click Next.

3. Choose the Language, Windows Edition, and Architecture on this page. Then click Next to continue.

4. Choose USB flash drive and click Next.

5. Follow the step-by-step guide to create the bootable drive. When it says 'Your USB flash drive is ready', click Finish to exit.

Step 2. Boot from the USB drive.

1. Restart your computer and enter BIOS setting.
2. Set the USB drive as the first boot option in BIOS.
3. Restart and boot from the USB drive.

Step 3. Install Windows 10 on SSD.

1. Select your language preferences, and click on Next button to continue.

2. On the next page, click on Install now.

3. Enter the license key and click Next.

4. Accept the license terms and click Next.

Windows 10 Ssd Hdd Configuration

5. Choose [Custom: Install Windows only (advanced)] to perform a clean install.

6. Choose the SSD to install Windows 10.Once the installation is done, Windows 10 will reboot. You can go to BIOS to change boot order and boot from the new SSD.

If you are able to boot from the new SSD successfully, you can delete unnecessary partitions on the old HDD with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition.

Conclusion

This post has shown you two ways to complete SSD and HDD setup. If you don't know how to setup SSD and HDD combo Windows 10, you can refer methods in this post to set SSD as boot drive and SSD as storage drive.

Ssd And Hdd Drives

If you have any question about how to setup SSD and HDD Windows 10, you can leave a message in the following comment zone and we will reply as soon as possible. If you have better solutions toward SSD and HDD setup, please don't hesitate to share it with us. If you need any help when using MiniTool software, you can contact us via [email protected].