Lifehacker tip: Label your hard drive with installation date

The weekend before last I went through the tiresome task of upgrading the hard drives on my main desktop. I was up to my scuppers with music and videos without much headroom to do anything else. I always thought that a 500GB secondary drive would be enough, but that didn't last long. Also, they tell you it's a good idea to replace your drives every couple years before you hit the mean time before failure (MTBF). I think those drives have been in my computer before I upgraded to a quad core system a year ago. And who knows how long they were in there before that.

Then it struck me. Instead of wracking my brain and trying to count the months since I last installed the drive, why not label my drive with the installation date? That way I know for sure how long it's been in there, and I have a good idea of when I should replace it next.


So the next time around, there won't be any doubt as to how long this drive has been in the computer. May this hard drive last me well into my Windows 7 years (and maybe 8). Now, only if the OS, or even the SMART info would just tell you when you added the hard drive...

Bonus

And as a bonus, I need to send a shout out to Acronis True Image 10. I've been using this for a couple years for ghosting my primary hard drive (I just copy everything on the secondary drive to an external drive for off-site storage). In addition to being able to copy and compress an entire hard disk, it also has some utilities built into it for mucking around with your partitions. Acronis gives you the ability to clone a source drive to a destination drive, and will also resize your partitions to fit onto the new drive. This was exactly what I needed for moving things from the old 500GB drive to a 1TB drive.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/