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first question on superuser - pls excuse if asked elsewhere.

I have a Dell Precision 690 with one 73GB (15000RPM) SAS drive in it. Running Windows 7 (x64) with a bunch of apps means it is running out of space. I have on order a 147GB (15000RPM) SAS drive (same GB/s, same make) which I want to put into the machine.

Not knowing anything about SAS, do I need to replace the 73GB with the 147GB and restore from a backup, or can I put the drive in the machine and get the controller to treat the two drives as one large one? (The original paperwork for the machine says 73GB SAS (No RAID) if that is relevant.)

UPDATE: It has been suggested that I use the second disk for the data and keep my OS on the first. The biggest culprit after C:\Windows (22GB) is C:\ProgramData (13.5GB) and it would appear from this question that ProgramData can't easily be moved.

I would rather therefore just have one big C:\ drive - is this feasible with the two different sized SAS drives in the one machine, and can I do so without reinstall/backup-restore?

Thanks in advance.

PS Thanks to those that kindly migrated my question from serverfault.

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  • I've given an answer, but superuser.com is the more appropriate place for this type of question. May 21, 2010 at 9:59

2 Answers 2

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The machine will see it initially as just a second disk and I'd be tempted to just leave it as that and move your data or apps to it, leaving your OS on your 73GB disk.

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  • Thanks for confirming I can just drop the drive in, but the issue with Win7 seems to be that it just takes up so much storage for itself and its data, and there isn't (as far as I can tell) any easy way to move that data. May 22, 2010 at 7:12
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You do not need to replace the drive as you can put both the drives in the same machine. You can connect the drive to another port on the controller. This will let you move some of your data onto that drive, although it is best if you leave the 73GB disk as a system disk with your programs installed on it and just move your data to the second disk.

In this way, SAS is no different from any other type of hard disk.

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