For those more experienced with partitioning drives, you can select the type of volume you would like, and proceed as normal from there. Right click on the longer information box of your new disk and select 'create simple volume'.

Now that your disk is online and initialized, we need to format the space.

If you're confused as to what those abbreviations mean, here's a helpful guide. Choose the which type of disk you want (either GPT or MBR) and accept. If the box came up immediately, you do not need to right click anything. depending on how many disks you already had)', and select initialize disk. Right click on the box that Says 'Disk 1(2,3, etc. If your disk is already online, feel free to skip No. Depending on the sophistication of your hardware, some disks will automatically come online, some will need to be initialized, and some will prompt the initialization process imiediately. Click on Administrative Tools, and then computer management. Or, you can right click on the Windows button and select Disk Management directly from there (thanks to /u/Madmagican- for that one). Open up your Control Panel, change it to Classic View (this just means changing the View By option from Category to Large Icons). Now that your computer is on and the drive is plugged in, we still need to allocate the space on the drive.

Once everything is set up, put the new drive into the slot in your case, and plug in both cables. Wouldn't want any electrical issues! Also make sure your cables are plugged into the proper places on your motherboard. Also make sure your power cable has an open slot for your new drive.īefore taking off your case's side panels, make sure to turn off your PC and unplug it, Including flipping the switch on your PSU as well. My case had plenty of slots, so that wasn't an issue, but make sure you have enough SATA cables / cable slots on your motherboard to add another drive. This should be obvious, but make sure your case / hardware can support the addition of another drive. I wrote this so that almost everyone would be able to understand and follow along, so sorry to those more experienced PC builders who might find parts of this guide redundant. I recently bought myself a 2TB HDD to move a lot of my data off of my SSD, and I thought I'd share the process for those unfamiliar with adding a new storage drive.

Windows 10 add new hard drive