I've just recently bought a new PC with a high-speed SSD and a hard disk drive.
I do care much about its performance and don't intend to slow it down by any means.
I have an old 2 TB Green Western Digital HDD which has worked for over six years. I just want to use it for archiving. No apps and games and OS will be installed on it.
Will using that hard disk drive affect my new PC's performance?
I understand that you wish to install the old HDD as internal disk inside your new computer.
An unused disk will not affect the global performance, but you should be thinking of other factors: The disk is relatively old (as disks go), so may have a limited lifetime. The fact that it will be powered-on now for some years to come, will use up the spin-time that is still left for it.
This is why I would recommend buying a USB enclosure and installing the disk inside it. The disk will be used as external, and will be turned off when not required (which I understand will be almost always). This way you will extend its remaining lifetime for additional several years.
Overall, no, it will not affect your PC's general performance. Only applications that make use of data stored on that HDD will experience a performance penalty due to the slower data speeds of that harddrive.
Using the drive for cold storage (data that isn't actively being used), which is what you're describing, should just work fine.
From a Hardware Standpoint: It shouldn't, but this may depend on the SATA chip on the motherboard. Having to read large quantities of information through a slow channel might adversely impact information flowing through another channel on the same chip. This, however, only applies if/when the disk is actively used. I had this happen to me (it was not very noticeable, but became really obvious when cloning whole hard disks). It's more complicated than "chip", though; see this other answer.
From a Software / Operating System Standpoint: Again it shouldn't, but there are many cases when a background process might want to perform a scan of all attached storage (typically this applies to search tools and antiviruses, but scheduled defrag also). Usually this kind of activity only happens when the system is otherwise idle, so this too shouldn't have a noticeable impact.
Spin up power spike: amending my previous answer, there is one (rather fiddly) case in which the external USB enclosure can have a significant negative impact with USB powered devices. This was a Seagate FireCuda 2TB external hard disk for backups. Over time, the industrial miniPC it was attached to got several other gadgets connected. Nobody thought of that, but at a certain point what began to happen was that the PC would work flawlessly with the drive powered down; then at 02:00 AM the backup program would wake, request for a disk spin-up, the disk would start drawing close to the maximum current for the USB port, and that was enough for the PC to go into protective powerdown. The problem was immediately discovered (and the PC, long overdue for an upgrade, replaced with a much more powerful one). All the same, it's something you might want to keep in mind.
The best option seems to follow @harrymc's advice and attach it on-demand, through an external powered USB enclosure.
I've observed that some Windows 10 GUI operations (for example "open file" dialogs or opening Windows Explorer windows) will hang when you have an inactive external USB drive connected. I think it's trying to rescan the list of disks and/or read some information from each, and if your mechanical drive has spun down (or your USB SSD is sleeping), then any programs performing such operations will hang for several seconds while the drive spins up to read the data, even if you don't actually want to access the drive.
I'm not sure if your mechanical drive will spin down when installed internally. Some will, some won't, and you may be able to configure it to prevent spinning down upon inactivity (though I'm not sure if that's good for lifespan). Anyway, application IO hangs, and random spin-ups and spin-downs (which might wear out your disk?), are things to watch out for.
I will tell you about my personal experience. I have a main SSH disk for Windows and programs and HDD for storing information. My hard disk drive was slowing down my computer. I did a few things to prevent this from happening.
I have excluded my HDD from the swap file. Because when the computer runs out of RAM, the computer will use your disks as additional memory for RAM.
I have excluded my hard disk drive for search indexing. Thus, the less the computer works with the old disk, the better it is. Any access by the computer to the old disk will slow down the computer, because there are many hidden processes that you cannot control, and if your disk is old, then the transfer speed will be very low.
My advice is to check if your hard disk drive is used for the swap file and if your HDD is indexed for search. If so, then turn off these features for your hard disk drive.
This will help you to extend the performance of the HDD and will allow the computer not to waste resources to work with a slow HDD. And yes. Old hard disk drive slows down your computer due to hidden processes.
Yes, there are edge cases where the HDD can slow down your system.
Specifically, your system could be configured to spin down the HDD when not in use (as it should be unless it is a server disk which are designed to preferably spin 24/7). Sometimes, some application will request information about all partitions in the system, and then this operation will wait until the HDD has been spun up again. In my pretty top-notch PC at home this can take some 5-10 seconds for two old HDDs. Happens every once in a while; I know who the culprits are, it doesn't bother me, but if this were a critical PC, say one which needs to perform near-realtime tasks, then I would take them out.
So if you don't want to physically remove it, you should at least make sure it has no partitions, or the partitions are not mounted.
Minimally. Some people like to disable on board peripherals to reduce interrupts and oversight load.
Since you are likely to be using at least one SATA port you probably will not be doing this.
If it is mounted and you are running Windows 10, it is likely to be pounded as is the fate of such disks.
Scans and indexing. If the disk is slow then CPU consumption will be lower as the fire is not being fed as fast. But still more cumulative work.
I know you are not asking, but use it for media files or Steam games that don't need the speed. Things that can be re-downloaded when it does eventually fail.
Or put it in an enclosure and mount it on demand.
Dont use it as a system or a swap disk.
You can observe little performance slow down when copying data from or to that disk.
If you have a desktop computer, you can consider using a HDD power switch which can be mounted in a free slot (outside the motherboard).
In the disk manager of Windows you can switch the disk online or offline and with the hardware switch you can switch the power off after you put it in offline mode. Windows won't access the Harddisk when it is unpowered and the disk will also live longer.
I also use the 2Tb disk for archiving and this is the best solution I found so far. The other alternatives like having an external case and having to plug/unplug or keeping the Harddisk always connected have many drawbacks.
I am unsure about putting direct links to specific products here, but just a search of "HDD Power switch" in google will show you this kind of switch.
Here's some details. First, normally it will not cause your system to slow down. As the hard drive ages you will have more issues with it see below:
However, the old it is the higher probability it will get bad sectors. Windows will get stuck on bad sectors left untreated. You whole system WILL freeze, possibly a couple of minutes, and then it will be fine again for a while.
Also as the sectors start to wear out the hard drive will need to do more ECC (error correction). As the problem gets worse, read/write speeds will diminish until its painful to use the drive or it fails.
You can
chkdsk /r d:
After it scans the hdd, which can take hours, the bad sectors will be found and marked so they won't be used. Then the OS won't trip over them until new bad sectors occur.
