Recently self-built my very first rig, and put in 1 SSD and 1 HHD, the HHD was of size 1T.

Newegg had a deal on a 3T (7200RPM, 64Mb Cache, SATA 3) that I simply couldn't turn down. Normal price was $179.99 (but really, does ANYONE actually pay that price?) with a $30 instant savings making it $149.99. Then they had a code (expires tomorrow) to take an additional $10.00, making it $139.99. And they had a one day special to get a $30 rebate, which means I got a pretty good 3T hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) for $109.99. That sounded good to me so I jumped.

Would replacing my 1T with the 3T be simply a matter of copying all the data I have on that drive somewhere (either an e-SATA, USB drive, or even temporarily to the SSD), taking it out, putting the new 3T back in, and then copying all the data onto it??

Again, thanks so much for all of the help at this site. Also have a couple of Steam questions and I don't use the Steam forums, but I'll wait and ask them later cause I want to take care of replacing this hard drive first.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148844&nm_mc=TEMC-RMA-Approvel&cm_mmc=TEMC-RMA-Approvel-_-Content-_-text-_-

EDIT: Dammit, I forgot to make it a QUESTION again so that someone could get the rep. Is there any way to change it to a question after I've posted in?

Depends on the content. If it's just data, the yeah, just copy, remove old drive, and install new. If it's programs or certain games, then you may have issues due to the registry pointing to the old drive.

However, why not just keep the old drive installed and install the new one as well? Or do you need the old one for something else?

Long story, but I'm out of SATA connections.

And there are games on this drive. ALL of my GOG games, in fact. Well, all of them I've DL so far. That was why I wanted to get a bigger drive, cause I'd like to get my whole library DL in case GOG ever goes Tango Uniform.

There are tools for cloning an old drive to a bigger new one. Some vendors even distribute them together with their drives (or let you download them from their support sites). I don't have any personal experience with them though, I never had to use one.

Is that the installers you're talking about (the files you download) or the installed files (what you run when you want to play the game)? The former you can just copy anywhere you have space to spare temporarily (or redownload after the switch), the latter can be more sensitive to being moved around willy-nilly, but as long as they finally end up in the same location (drive letter and path) it shouldn't be a problem.

As Miaghstir pointed out, it would depend on what you mean. If it's just the game installers, that's just data, so you can copy and replace the drive. If the games are installed on that drive, most of GOG's games can be moved pretty easily without too much hassle. All you'd need to do is edit the desktop shortcut to point to the right location. But if you install the new drive and give it the same drive letter as the old one, you shouldn't have any issues if you keep the file structure the same as on the old drive.

Hope that's not too confusing. If you need clarification, just ask and we can get more detailed.

Just as a sidenote, 3TB means you need to use gpt, so the drive will not work out of the box with windows xp. Later windows versions have no problem with gpt.

About transferring your data just like psyringe wrote, check the hardware manufacturers page for tools.

Thanks for the replies everyone. Yes, the stuff on that hard drive are the installed games, not the downloads. But I just thought if I named the new drive the same as I did the old drive, and copied everything that when I put it on the new drive it would have the same files in the same paths. And then it should work, right?

But downloads themselves (GOG downloads) go to the C: drive (SSD) under My documents. With GOG, I can stipulate which drive to install the games to, and since they're almost always older games and won't push my hardware at all, I choose to put my GOG games on a HDD even though the SSD is faster.

LOL, this is related to one of my Steam questions. For some reason I don't get the option to change anything related to Steam, and everything related to Steam is on my SSD. I would prefer all of that be on my HDD as well, including the Steam client software itself. Is there a way to do that?

Moving a Steam Installation, I assume you mean something like that.

Yep, should work. Just make sure you keep the same file structure on the new drive. i.e. if you have your GOG games on your old drive as D:\GOG\Games\[game name], then make sure it's the same setup on the new drive. Then you'll be golden. Technically, yes, but it's an ugly hack if memory serves. Easiest is to uninstall Steam, then put it on the new drive. Just copy the Steam installer onto your new drive and run it on there. It will set up on that drive and you'll be good to go. Of course, you'll have to reinstall all your games, but Steam's backup should work fairly well for that.

I need to add something important: with windows you can only boot from a gpt drive with windows7 64bit and a newer motherboard using uefi. If you use any other version (32bit, Vista) or an older bios-only motherboard you can't boot from that drive and need to keep your old drive. More details you can find on the microsoft-page. While you use your ssd as first system and boot drive there should be no problem in your case. Regarding steam I'm not sure, but I believe there are tools that allows you to lead steam to new folders.

This won't be an issue for me for two reasons. 1) I am using Windows 7 64-bit professional edition. And 2) this will not be my boot drive. My SSD is my boot drive. But I am very grateful for your post, because I didn't know ANY of that stuff. :)

He can just copy the folders and steam will appear to download again. But it's really just validating them and even for a multigigabyte game it should only take a couple minutes.

That's normally how I back up my Steam games. As long as the OP can still log into Steam that will work.
I'd recommend using Teracopy to do the actual copying to the new disk. It is much more resilient than the Windows tools and will tell you what didn't copy correctly if need be.

If it's just data (and not your boot drive, sounds like it's not):
1) Plug the new one in, let it mount as a drive letter.
2) Install a free program called TeraCopy
3) Use TeraCopy to move the data
and if you want to make the new drive the same as the old letter (assuming you have programs installed there)
4) Shut down your machine
5) Switch the SATA cables between the two SATA drives (leave them plugged into the mobo at the same spot)
6) Boot, if the new drive letters are right, wipe the old drive (format or just delete, your choice)

It's probably not a bad idea to just copy the data and run dvdsig on the original disk to generate a list of checksums and then verify on the new copies to make sure that things copied correctly. With the number of files likely involved, going with something more reliable than a checksum is probably not a bad idea.