After nearly two months of having the hard drive in the box, I finally got around to installing the hard drive in the PC computer yesterday.

The hard drive I purchased is the Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA II 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02860

Using my SATA and PATA to USB internal hard drive desktop adapter, I was able to do a complete clone of my old 400 GB internal HD with the new drive hooked up to the adapter and a USB port. Prior to cloning the HD using the backup software Acronis, I first formatted the new drive using the administrative tools, in the control panel, and navigated to the computer management, disk management area to format the hard drive. Note that the hard drive is a virgin drive and will not be seen properly by the operating system until it is mounted and formatted.

Once the hard drive is completely formatted (which I think took more than an hour and a half),I  then used Acronis backup and cloning software to make a complete image backup. When doing a clone of a HD, everything is exactly the same as the original, expect for an increase in the storage capacity from the old to the new.

The version of the cloning and backup software I am using is: True Image Home 2011 Plus

Acronis Product Features Include:

• PC Backup and Recovery of Systems, Applications, and Files – Have you ever accidentally deleted a file, had a virus corrupt your files, or had a disk fail?
• Fast and Easy Backup and Recovery – Acronis True Image Home 2011 provides complete system image backup and recovery of your home PC’s operating system, applications, settings, and personal files.
• New Windows 7 Integration – True Image Home 2011 scales to the needs of novices and advanced users alike
• New Graphical User Interface – We have redesigned our recognized user-friendly interface with new features like Drag and Drop for faster navigation.
• Continuous Data Protection – Acronis Nonstop Backup automatically creates incremental backups every five minutes allowing users to roll back their systems, files, and folders to any point in time in the past.

After the cloning process was finished, I then shut down the computer, pulled the old drive out and installed the new, turned the computer back on, and voila, the computer had 1 TB of HD storage space instead of the 400 GB and all my programs were as they should be.

It is interesting to note that the old hard drive was a IDE cable parallel ATA “PATA” type, and the new HD is a serial ATA “SATA” type. Since my motherboard on the computer had the capabilities of running either the old PATA or SATA HD, this was the first time since I had last built the computer that I was installing a larger hard drive. The old drive was actually out of my old last generation computer. Once the new hard drive was installed, I definitely noticed speed improvements to the system. I plan on using the 400 GB PATA drive in the old external HD case which has a USB port on it.

Speaking of computers, it is somewhat difficult to tell what generation of computer I am using at any given time. Here I am typing away using Windows Live Writer (which only runs on Windows operating system software), on my MacBook Pro, running VMware Fusion, running Windows 7 Ultimate, on the MAC OS X Snow Leopard operating system software, with 8 GB of RAM (which I just upgraded from 4GB to 8GB).

I am very impressed with VMware Fusion 3 for being able to run all the PC based programs that you can imagine. It is actually cool to be able to run both the Apple OS side and the Microsoft Windows side at the same time. I tend to run these programs in different spaces (Apple OS feature that lets you have multiple desktops in four different quadrants, with different programs and files open in each space). It can get a bit confusing when trying to remember which system I am using at any given moment. Windows updates just like on a PC, and Apple updates on the other side too. In fact, Windows 7 just came out with a major update in the form of “Service Pack 1.” This took a bit of time to download and install. It required turning off the virtual computer and then virtually rebooting. I did not have to reboot the whole MacBook Pro.

Once I had performed the updates on my MacBook Pro on the Windows side of the coin, I felt it was important to do a Time Machine backup on the Apple side of the coin. Any case, it is like having the best of both worlds on this computer.

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Jim Warholic