Replacing external disk but keeping Time Machine history

Today I have a 500 GB USB3 HDD connected to the Mac and backed-up by Time Machine.
This HDD has less than 30GB free space and I have a replacement one (a bigger size and faster HDD).
I have copied the files from the old to the new USB3 HDD (using Finder as this is just pictures, videos, musique, docs, so nothing complicated that would require cloning).
To keep the history of modifications and deleted files from the old external HDD once I use exclusively the new external HDD, how shall I do that?
Having the same HDD name is enough?
Thank you for your help

Having no answer, I took the decision to experiment.
I renamed the new external USB HDD with the same name as the older (soon to be replaced) ones and copied via Finder all the files on it (Aperture libraries, videos, documents).
By using Time Machine while on the new drive (not backing up, but just looking at older backups), I was able to see the previous versions of the external USB HDD files. So I thought that was that easy.
So I decided to manually trigger a new TM backup. However, it computed something like close to 500 GB to backup. Thus eventhough in terms of history for now I can trick TM to think it is the same HDD, when it comes to create a new backup, it simply wants to rebackup everything.
Now I'm getting worried because:
I don't know if the history will be kept after the backup has run;
Because it will push 500GB of data to the TM storage, it might fill it up and TM will start to remove older backup whereas this would have been unnecessary.
Note: I don't rely solely on TM for backup, I use Crashplan as well. So if I lose TM, it is "OK" as I could always restore something from Crashplan, but then for the oldest backup (for the last 2 years) I would only have one copy instead of 2... It is not that critical as I do not think I deleted something I would like to restore from that time period. But our of curiosity I would like to still found out how to properly change an external HDD that was backed-up by Time Machine without losing the history.

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    By using Time Machine while on the new drive (not backing up, but just looking at older backups), I was able to see the previous versions of the external USB HDD files. So I thought that was that easy.
    So I decided to manually trigger a new TM backup. However, it computed something like close to 500 GB to backup. Thus eventhough in terms of history for now I can trick TM to think it is the same HDD, when it comes to create a new backup, it simply wants to rebackup everything.
    Now I'm getting worried because:
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    Because it will push 500GB of data to the TM storage, it might fill it up and TM will start to remove older backup whereas this would have been unnecessary.
    Note: I don't rely solely on TM for backup, I use Crashplan as well. So if I lose TM, it is "OK" as I could always restore something from Crashplan, but then for the oldest backup (for the last 2 years) I would only have one copy instead of 2... It is not that critical as I do not think I deleted something I would like to restore from that time period. But our of curiosity I would like to still found out how to properly change an external HDD that was backed-up by Time Machine without losing the history.

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