Issues Installing extra HD

[The Spirit of October]

Hello all,

My gaming rig has a whimpy 120gb HD that one game filled up, so I needed to upgrade my Storage space. I grabbed a decent 500gb HD and installed it into HD slot 2 of my computer. I powered it up and it recognized the new device and downloaded the drivers then asked for a restart. After the restart however everything is now moving extremely slow and my computer is not recognizing that there is another HD. It is only showing the one 120gb one. I have tried multiple restarts to no prevail. It now takes my computer an extra 20 min to boot up and anything I do takes several minutes to load. What do I do to fix this so that my computer is back to running full speed with 500gb of extra wiggle room?

[Miragen]

Wait what?
RAM is a different kind of memory than the memory on your HDD.
You upgrade RAM by purchasing a chip with more RAM and replace your old smaller RAM cards.
And what do you mean by installing a HD? You attach the right cables and thats that.
If your computer doesn't recognize the new HDD it might need to be partioned, or your BIOS has the wrong settings.

[God Emperor Baldur]

You need to go to Disk Management and find the hard drive there. It should be unallocated and you can change that and partition the space, give it a letter, all that stuff there. Now if it's not showing, you may either have a bad hard drive or bad power supply.

[The Spirit of October]

Miragen

Wait what?
RAM is a different kind of memory than the memory on your HDD.
You upgrade RAM by purchasing a chip with more RAM and replace your old smaller RAM cards.
And what do you mean by installing a HD? You attach the right cables and thats that.
If your computer doesn't recognize the new HDD it might need to be partioned, or your BIOS has the wrong settings.

Whoops brain fart. Fixed my post. How do I check the BIOS settings or if it needs to be partitioned?

[Miragen]

The Spirit of October

Miragen

Wait what?
RAM is a different kind of memory than the memory on your HDD.
You upgrade RAM by purchasing a chip with more RAM and replace your old smaller RAM cards.
And what do you mean by installing a HD? You attach the right cables and thats that.
If your computer doesn't recognize the new HDD it might need to be partioned, or your BIOS has the wrong settings.

Whoops brain fart. Fixed my post. How do I check the BIOS settings or if it needs to be partitioned?

On startup you can access BIOS, it can vary what button you're gonna need but it should say somewhere press X to access BIOS.
like DEL or F10 etc.
There you can see if it gets detected to begin with, and you can set primary - secondary drives and all that.
I'm not quite sure if it varies too much per MOBO, and you should look up a little tutorial if you're not entirely sure what you're doing.

[Miragen]

God Emperor Baldur

You need to go to Disk Management and find the hard drive there. It should be unallocated and you can change that and partition the space, give it a letter, all that stuff there. Now if it's not showing, you may either have a bad hard drive or bad power supply.

This could be the next step if BIOS is all good but it's still not working.
Again for the non tech savy a little readup on whats going on there is recommended.
It's pretty easy, but it's also pretty easy to ******** things up pretty bad.

[NaklsonofNakkl]

It sounds like your drivers could possibly be corrupted. I recommend just going to device manager.

arrow Press Windows Key + R
arrow Type in: devmgmt.msc
arrow Look for your second hard drive
arrow Click 'uninstall device/drivers'
arrow Restart your computer

It should attempt to re-install the drivers after the restart. If that still doesn't work, I would try unplugging the hard drive from the computer and see if the speed is still slow, it could be that your hard drive is faster than the ports on your computer.

What is the computer/mother board model and what is the hard drive model?

[The Spirit of October]

Thanks all, will try these out and let you know the results tomorrow!

[The Spirit of October]

Update - It's not showing up under Disk Management so I am going to attempt to check the BIOS. Doing research at the moment to make sure I know what to look for when I get to the BIOS before I reboot.

Also on my most recent reboots they have gone much faster than before and processes on the computer are going smoothly so far. The program that loaded up the drivers when I first put the HD in recognizes that I have two drives.

The program is called "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" and it read that "Array_0000" has a 477GB Drive and a 114GB Drive in Port 0 and port 1 respectively. While this program shows the drive explorer does not.

EDIT - The program also tells me that both of these disks are set for RAID 0 configuration which if i am not mistaking is indeed what I am aiming for if I understand correctly that RAID 0 basically just means that by adding the 477 more GB I now have a nearly 600GB HD essentially (however this is not what appears in explorer which says I have 114GB with only 20GB free.)

[The Spirit of October]

And checked the BIOS. It said SATA1 is 500GB and SATA2 is 120GB so it appears that they are being recognized. I checked all the BIOS windows though to see if there was a mention of which one was Master and which was Slave. I have my OS on the 120GB one so I was hoping to make the 500GB one the slave.

[Miragen]

The Spirit of October

And checked the BIOS. It said SATA1 is 500GB and SATA2 is 120GB so it appears that they are being recognized. I checked all the BIOS windows though to see if there was a mention of which one was Master and which was Slave. I have my OS on the 120GB one so I was hoping to make the 500GB one the slave.

Then i'm not too sure either, it should just show up under disk management if the BIOS it set up correctly.
I don't know much about RAID but i do believe that 0 is the one to go for yes.

[psychic stalker]

Miragen

The Spirit of October

And checked the BIOS. It said SATA1 is 500GB and SATA2 is 120GB so it appears that they are being recognized. I checked all the BIOS windows though to see if there was a mention of which one was Master and which was Slave. I have my OS on the 120GB one so I was hoping to make the 500GB one the slave.

Then i'm not too sure either, it should just show up under disk management if the BIOS it set up correctly.
I don't know much about RAID but i do believe that 0 is the one to go for yes.

RAID 0 is NEVER "the one to go for." Setting aside the fact that it requires two disks of identical size and speed to work correctly, one failure on one of the drives means a loss of all data. There is no reason or excuse to ever use RAID 0 in any configuration except nested RAID (like 1+0, 0+1, 5+0, etc.), and even then, it's a stupid idea.

In this situation, RAID should be disabled entirely.

[Miragen]

psychic stalker

Miragen

The Spirit of October

And checked the BIOS. It said SATA1 is 500GB and SATA2 is 120GB so it appears that they are being recognized. I checked all the BIOS windows though to see if there was a mention of which one was Master and which was Slave. I have my OS on the 120GB one so I was hoping to make the 500GB one the slave.

Then i'm not too sure either, it should just show up under disk management if the BIOS it set up correctly.
I don't know much about RAID but i do believe that 0 is the one to go for yes.

RAID 0 is NEVER "the one to go for." Setting aside the fact that it requires two disks of identical size and speed to work correctly, one failure on one of the drives means a loss of all data. There is no reason or excuse to ever use RAID 0 in any configuration except nested RAID (like 1+0, 0+1, 5+0, etc.), and even then, it's a stupid idea.

In this situation, RAID should be disabled entirely.

Hence why i said, i don't know about RAID.

[BerserkLeon]

On my mobo, I think certain SATA ports are reserved for RAID or some such thing. All I know is if I plug something into them, it doesn't really work.
Try another SATA port?

[God Emperor Baldur]

Miragen

The Spirit of October

And checked the BIOS. It said SATA1 is 500GB and SATA2 is 120GB so it appears that they are being recognized. I checked all the BIOS windows though to see if there was a mention of which one was Master and which was Slave. I have my OS on the 120GB one so I was hoping to make the 500GB one the slave.

Then i'm not too sure either, it should just show up under disk management if the BIOS it set up correctly.
I don't know much about RAID but i do believe that 0 is the one to go for yes.

RAID 0 is a type of RAID that uses both hard drives as one. If both are configured under RAID 0, that can explain the issue that's going on