Hard Drive Full- What to do???

[Gavin Allan]

My 80GB/7200 rpm hard drive on my Dell PC is full. I don't really think I need a new PC yet- it works fine for what I need. (2-core Intel, 4GM RAM, Windows 7) I don't really have a lot of data files, videos, music, etc., but rather I think it is Windows and Office and other software that has filled most of it up. I have removed everything I don't need, and I have run CCleaner and DeFrag to clean it up as best as it is gonna get.



What is my best option:



1. Install a second hard drive?



2. Upgrade hard drive to larger one?



3. Keep what I have and compress it?



4.??



Pros/Cons?



Thanks

 

[Jacob Dryer]

1. easy and fairly cheap and can act as a backup for important files (duplicate important stuff there in addition to just extra storage)

2. would require all the same as 1 with the addition of cloning the drive, not difficult but time consuming

3. compression will slow it down

4. external hard drive - same as 1 but easier to install, slower data access though (not sure you would notice with small files/movement)



I would go 1 or 4.. personally I would do 1, but I wouldn't bat an eye at cracking a case and installing a hard drive, others aren't as comfortable inside a computer. Another possibility is that you may not have the space in the case or a big enough power supply.. unlikely but without knowing the computer it's a possibility..

 

[scott degroot]

DO NOT COMPRESS. Pick yourself another hard drive and throw it in there it's fairly easy to do.

 

[Scott Tanner]

go down to wallyworld and get a seagate 1TB cloud drive... all pc's can access, and you can get to it from the web... $100...



can backup all's to it, plugs into network, you can share pics with relatives via internet. these are solid state drives, no moving parts

 

[TRACket Paul]

I use a USB external drive.

 

[Wes Davis]

There has got to be a lot of something on that hard drive that you're not aware of. There is no way 80 gigs is filled up with Windows and other various programs. There must be either photos, videos, movies or songs on there to take up all that space. Or the drive is partitioned and you have filled up only a small partition(most likely problem). For my job I have thousands more like hundreds of thousands of photographs stored on my computer along with several videos and umpteen different proprietary programs and all of the day to day normal programs on any computer and I am only using 60 gigs.







/

 

[Roger Batts]

It could also be filled with backups and shadow copies. If you don't run disk cleanup every once in a while, they will eat up space quick! Run cleanup, select the option to clean all but the most recent backup, and see how much space that frees up.

 

[Richard L]

Spend a little time deleting files you know you don't need. Then follow that with a run of the Windows Disk Cleanup utility and let it clear all the Temp files and everything that's still in your Recycle Bin.



Hopefully that will give you enough room to keep the system running until you get second hard drive...either internal or external. Then move all or most of your data files, photos, videos, and music to the secondary drive and just use you main drive for the operating system and software.



Then, you can use a portion of the secondary drive to backup your main drive.



I have a NAS with two, 1 TB hard drives setup as a RAID-1 system and the My Documents folder is mapped to the NAS drive. I also have a small USB toaster docking station for hard drives that allows me to just drop in any SATA hard drive with no other wire hookups necessary. I use 256 GB drive to back up my main "C" drive.



I just recently bought a new Seagate 1 TB external USB 3.0 drive (only $59 at TigerDirect) that I will be using for my backups.



...Rich

 

[Gavin Allan]

I checked I have a 74GB drive. I agree it seems weird that it is so full- I have run cleanup and Ccleaner on it, as well as defrag and scandisk for bad sectors, etc. I'll try to look at it more closely this weekend to see if there is anything suspicious taking up space.



Thanks for the advice. I pretty much concur / already knew what you told me, but I hadn't considered ST Tanner's suggestion of a network drive.



I am not afraid to tear into the case. I have upgraded processors, video cards, memory, motherboards, etc on PCs with no trouble. I have never cloned a drive- would hate to have to do a complete reloading of everything- so that part scares me a bit that a new drive cloned might not work right.



Adding a second drive sounds OK, but I would have to remember to store my data files, etc, there and not keep putting them on C: I guess there is probably a way to change the defaults to the new drive so that wouldn't be such a problem.



What I don't want to do is slow things down or get stuff scattered across multiple places where I can't find it, etc.



Got to learn more about cloning before I invest in a fix.

 

[Richard L]

Gavin,

Yes, I have a network drive (NAS = Network Access Storage) set up as a RAID-1 system (1 TB drive is the Master, and a duplicate 1 TB drive is the Shadow drive) I store "My Documents" on the NAS drive. Any time anything gets written to My Documents, it is immediately copied to the Shadow drive. The only problem with the NAS drives is that they are pretty slow. If I want to access a file from My Documents, it takes a few seconds delay to get the file and load it.



Also, your 74 GB drive is pretty small by today's standards. I would recommend nothing smaller than 500GB, and a 1 TB or 2 TB is preferred, and are not that much more expensive. My 5 year old PC has a 500GB drive that I had to replace about 6 months ago, and unfortunately the Window Backup would not work to restore the latest backup to my new replacement drive...:angry: Fortunately, I had nearly all my data backed up on several different sources, so I was able to get all my important stuff back and about 98% of the less important stuff...:grin: But it did take me about 3 weeks to find and restore everything.



Just as an example...I am only using 49 GB of my 500GB "C" drive but the My Documents folder that I moved to the NAS drive is using up over 594GB of my 1 TB NAS drive. I keep a lot of my active documents in folders on my desktop so they load faster, and I will occasionally copy them to My Documents folder on the NAS drive as a safety net.



Since my hard drive crashed about 6 months ago, I keep 2 and 3 copies of everything....And I also purchased a really good backup program and I will never rely on the Window Backup to work. I even have a software program that monitors temperature and errors on my disks for and will inform me if it detects any potential problems before any of my hard drives goes out. The software only works on the drives connected to the PC and does not see the NAS drives since they are connected to the Network and not the PC.



...Rich

 

[Robert Howell]

Buy a much larger drive for cheap, clone existing drive and continue like normal. 80 gig wouldn't even hold two Blu-rays.

 

[LaRue Medlin]

Not to hijack this but Richard, what backup program did you get:supercool:

 

[Richard L]

LaRue,

After my hard drive crash and the Windows Backup/Restore failed, I downloaded the Free version of Macrium Reflect, which works great for making a Partition Image Backup and Restore. The only limitation of the Free version is you cannot select specific files to backup or restore.



After I used the Free version for a few months and liked it, I went ahead and bought the full version for about $19 or $29 ??? I don't recall the exact price.



In either case the Free version and the Full version worked flawlessly.



I also tried Acronis Backup software which does even more than Macrium, but I thought the user interface was a bit harder to use and understand.....I think that is because it has many more options to backup many different disk formats including Apple OS formats, which I don't have any need for.



I do like the Free Acronis Disk Monitor. It monitors your disk drive temperatures and warns you of any errors detected on the drive before you lose data or have a hard drive crash. I just checked my Disks, and the temperature on my "C" drive is 89 degrees Farenheit, and the Temperature of my new 1 TB USB 3.0 drive is 107 degree. It uses SMART monitoring, but your drive must be SMART compatible??....Not sure what that means, but 2 of my 3 hard drives are SMART drives. All my drives are newer SATA drives, so I not sure what makes them SMART drives? The one drive that is not SMART is a 250 GB drive mounted in drop-in toaster style USB 2.0 docking station and it is also the oldest hard drive?



...Rich