Hard Drives

[lt597]

Hi,



I have a question about Hard Drives and wondering if anyone could advise me. My internal hard drive is 20GB, i have about 12GB left. But because new windows update components are always being produced, it just keeps gradually filling up. So i want to get an external hard drive, but what happens when the internal one gets full and i cant fit anymore files in the folder system32? I currently have Windows XP. I mean if you know a way of how i can backup my most important files, and get a new internal one please let me know.



Thanks.

[Sovek]

heres what you do, get an internal drive first, dont bother with externals unless your planning to share a large number of files between computers a whole lot and you dont have a LAN. They are waaay more expensive than internal drives, and could probably break easier because its mobile, your tower isnt exactly mobile. I have no idea WHY your afraid of your HD filling up, I quite doubt your gonna use up 12gb on windows files. But if it does and you get a second HD, set the Swap file to the secondary drive and give yourself about 2 gigs or so of room, just to be safe.

[four]

12 Gig is a very large amount of space. I sincerly doubt that you would fill it with windows. An operating system should never take up more than 2 gig I would think. You are probably using up that space from other things, such as music, movies, or pictures even.

[yoaliens3000]

yea 12gig of system files is crazy. you dont need to be worried about system files taking up that much space. you could always buy a new internal harddrive and just clone all the data on the old harddrive to the new harddrive. some harddrive manufacturs bundle software that can do that really easily.

[four]

Both of the major ones, Western Digital and Maxtor do that.

[hawkburn]

If you plan to keep this computer for a long while in the future, I would go ahead and upgrade it. 10 years ago, the 2nd largest hard drive on the market was 500 MEGAbytes, not gigabytes. And no-one could even imaging how you would fill up something that "big" Of course, I doubt anyone could keep or use a 10 year old computer. Although, my old 10 year old Packard Bell will still boot Windows 95 just fine. It even works better than any Windows ME installation I've seen.. but that's not saying much

[four]

If you are just browsing the web and not downloading songs or movies then you are not going to need much of a hard drive. And I just noticed the last line in the original posters post.



You can have more than 1 internal Hard Drive. You can usually have 4 drives, which includes any CD drives that you have. So you are probably just using 2 right now. If you were to buy a new internal hard drive at a store like Best Buy or Circuit City they would install it for you without a problem.

[yoaliens3000]

the more a harddrive is filled up, can also make your computer slower ive noticed. even after a defrag, its never the same.

[four]

Well if it is filled to near capacity your swap file is going to have to be smaller making it operate slower, and defrag can't get rid of all of the fragmentation.