Maximum PC

I have finally decided to buy an SSD drive and I intend to use it as the boot drive on a computer that I built a couple of years ago. I have also done some research into setting it up properly and now what I need to know is what I need to do with the mechanical 250 GB SATA hard drive (that is currently the only drive in the system) in order to make it a storage drive only. I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installed on it. Thanks in advance for any and all helpful suggestions.

Just use the hard drives utility to format the 250 gig drive, or you can unplug the drive, install windows on the new SSD and go into the bios and make sure the bios is set to boot to the SSD and not the old drive, plug the old drive back in...with the system down and uplugged...boot back up and make sure you are on the SSD. This way you can go into drive management and format the drive from within windows.

Nasty

Thanks for the reply, Nasty. One question: Do I need to install the OS on the storage drive or will I be able to store my data on the drive without having to install an OS on the newly formatted storage drive?

Just format the storage drive via windows or the hard drives utility. Windows will be running on your SSD drive and that is all you need. Windows will list the storage drive as drive D, that is the drive you want to format in windows Drive Management.

Nasty

Hi
I just did a SSD upgrade with 2 SSDs last week and kept my 1.5 TB Mechanical drive, 1 SSD for boot and 1 SSD for games and the 1.5 for storage. I suggest checking out the following site the guys were great,
http://www.sevenforums.com/
This was my post,
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-dev ... stall.html
They were really helpful they also have easy to understand Tutorials and tweaks.

Okay. Thanks for the replies, Nastyman and papalarge. I will take your advice and use the links after I get the SSD tomorrow via UPS. Thanks again.

You can get a hard drive enclosure for the hard drive and use it as a USB external drive. I used just a 128 GB SSD drive and an external until i got a proper cable to install a 2nd drive.