Disk Space

[hhh8785]

i know my question might sound dumb but i have one. i am running out of hard disk space on my computer. is there any way to just add more space to my hard drive like you would add RAM? or would i have to buy a new hard drive and copy everything? what would be the best way to do this?

[shnikey]

The only way to increase disk space is to add another hard drive. IDE hard drives are not expensive. You can get a 40gb hd for under $300. When you get a new one you then have two choices. Just add it as extra disk space and have to hd in your PC, or copy the contents of the old one onto the new one. To copy you put in the new one, use a utility to do the copy, then remove the old hard drive.
Shnikey

[hd581]

Also, if you aren't already in FAT32 mode, you could probably convert your drive and gain back space. FAT16 tends to be ineffecient: I had a directory w/ 400 MB taking up 750 MB of space.

[Target]

Depending on the OS you are running, you could also consider using one of the disk compression utilities like Drivespace.

However, I strongly recommend that you go with another or larger hard-drive.

[jad1097]

You have three choices 1st is do a bunch of cleaning on the drive you have now. Get rid of every thing you do not use. 2nd if you are running windows 98 you can use DRVSPACE3 to compress your drive and doubble its size. However it will be extremly slow about half as fast as it is now. And finaly the 3rd and best thing to do is get a new drive. You can get a 10-15 gig drive for under $150. Then you copy your old drive to the new one or configure the new drive as a slave. I would think you would want to use your new drive as a master because it will most likely be a faster drive and have more cache and use the old one as a slave or secondary master.. Both Western Digital and Maxtor drives come with software for you to copy your old one to the new one. Or use a program such as Drive Image. It is a very simple procedure. I would suggest getting an IBM drive. 7200 RPM and 2MB cache
If you run into any problems there is always someone here to help. I hope this will help.

[This message has been edited by jad1097 (edited 01-19-2000).]

[Axel]

If you are running one of the newer versions of win95, go into the windows help directory and delete all of the *.avi files there - chances are you know how to point&click and you don't need a movie file on it. - that's a few MB right there.

I'm surprised no-one has suggested a compression tool, but then I don't use them myself - always gave me trouble.

Lastly, you won't have to copy everything over - you can if you like, chances are the new drive will be much faster than what you have, but that's for later. You could always pick up a small used drive cheap and slave it into your system and add another driver letter and some space that way. You might get away with it for less than $100.

OR - you might find a sympathetic soul here who would send you a used drive for the cost of the postage, and then we'd help you install it on this board.

Sorry - I myself only have a 120MB to spare at the moment.