Yay! My new hard drive arrived in the mail!
Excitedly, like a kid on a christmas morning, I put it in my external HDD enclosure, connected it to System #3 via its lovely USB 3.0 port and... and...!
It works and shows up in diskmgt.msc. Feelgood chemicals flood my brain.
I quick format it to NTFS and... everything works fine! :D CrystalDiskInfo detects that the drive is in pristine condition. Good!
Now what?
Well, time to let Windows updates (that I've delayed for months* because they take so long on the mechanical HDD) run on the Win10 machine and move on to my beloved System #1.
I unplug the HDD enclosure, turn on System #1 and connect the HDD to it. (Yes, I'm out of usable SATA ports because I've already filled them with hard drives. I swear I'm not [too much of] a hoarder, your honor!)
I copy over the entire contents of my internal 500 GB hard drive in System #1, that I intend to put into System #6 as the main (and at least at first, the only) drive.
This takes... quite a while, because it's 426 GB of data (including bucketloads of very small files) from a mechanical hard drive to another, over USB 2.0 ("x_x)
Windows tells me that it's gonna take over 6 hours.
That's fine. I'll just leave it running overnight.
I left it running overnight, and in the morning, the data was copied.
Time to compare it side by side with WinMerge!
...Which is also gonna take forever, it seems.
But I don't mind, as I head to work and leave it to do its thing at home.
Everything went as well as could be possibly expected, and I'm happy.
I think about those 8 (decimal) terabytes of storage space, and mentally salivate.
Sweet, sweet terabytes... Ahh.
*Ps. Did you know that you can stop the automatic forced updates and do them manually at your own pace, by editing a group policy? Works on Win 10 IOT LTSC at the very least...)
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