alandg46 Loc: Boerne, Texas

I have a 250mb Samsung SSD as "C", with 95 gb open, and two mirrored 3tb Western Digital Re drives with my photos, music, and the rest of my stuff, and a 2TB Western Digital Re drive for other stuff, I don't much care about one way or another, but might find useful someday. I disconnected my burner. I wasn't using it anyway.

photoman022 Loc: Manchester CT USA

I do the same thing with my photos. At the end of each year I send them over to my external hard drives (note the plural); you external hard drive will eventually go bad (I have had two to go bad); I use three of them. When one goes down I buy a new one and transfer all of the files to the new drive. I do this at night, when I'm a sleep.

I also back up my photos throughout the year because computers have been known to die.

redhogbill Loc: antelope, calif

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alandg46 Loc: Boerne, Texas

I have automated backups and one to a raid in a separate building.I don't want to have to remember. I just check it now and then.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Whatever you do, a backup strategy is essential if you are not going to lose data eventually. All hardware fails eventually, SSD or spinning rust, internal or external. SSDs are pretty good these days, so that shouldn't be an issue any more than traditional HDDs.

It seems that the OP has two primary problems: capacity and performance issues related to a maxed out system disk.

Those can be be addressed, but to do so will probably require a little system configuration knowledge as well as the willingness to to that kind of work.

If the OP is happy to approach those problems there are many tools that can help. One that I have found useful is Attobench32 (Atto Disk Benchmark) that will test and give feedback on disk access throughput, across any kind of disk, SSD, internal or external disks, which can be very helpful in performance tuning and deciding where different types of data reside on the various storage devices.

My own system is self built, and older than the OP's system, natively SATA 2 and USB 2.0, but with additional interface cards now supports SATA 3 and USB 3.0, so I have been able to tune I/O performance by matching multi-generational storage devices to appropriate interfaces and then match storage functions to data types. That has made a huge impact on overall performance without adding more memory or upgrading the Mobo, CPU and so on.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I have the same thing, except 16GB memory. I generally buy with less memory and add it for half the price.

jpendasulo Loc: TN

The nice thing about SSDs is that they can be stashed almost anywhere inside your PC. I use velcro to attach them inside the PC case. I use a 256GB for the OS and Programs and a 500GB for Photoshop and Lightroom photos and cache. That leaves space for two or three standard hard disks in the 3.5 inch drive bays for mirrored storage. Just be sure you have enough drive ports. There are usually four. You can disconnect the DVD drive for an extra port if necessary.

This and extra RAM made a great improvement in performance for me.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

First, I would highly recommend installing a second internal drive in your computer... or possibly more than one. It depends upon your particular desktop, but most can accommodate at least two HDs... some even more (one "full size" I used had six!). Generally speaking, adding an internal drive is the least inexpensive solution... and often will give the fastest and most efficient operation (better than all but the best external drives or network attached storage).

Not knowing what your computer has in it now, you might be able to get a larger or even much larger HD. It also depends upon your computer, just how large a HD it can handle. But most made the past five years have no trouble with 1TB or 2TB drives... even 3TB. Today you can buy these for around $50 per TB.

I would recommend an "enterprise class" drive. Those are beefed up internally for durability and reliability, especially made for 24/7/365 use in servers and such. As an example, I use 2TB Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 drives in my system (and Dell uses re-labeled Hitachi drives a lot). I've been able to buy these even cheaper in bulk, for about $25 per TB.

Adding a second drive to a desktop is pretty easy. But there are some precautions, so if you aren't sure about doing it yourself, find someone local to install it for you. That doesn't take long and shouldn't be expensive to have done.

You also could upgrade your primary (C) drive to something larger, if you wish, depending upon what you've already got. This is a bit more involved than simply adding a second drive, because the computer's operating system has to be transferred to the new C drive.

Personally I prefer to have a second drive in my desktop that's largely dedicated to image storage. It's my "hot file".... where my most current photos that I'm doing a lot of work with are stored. After about a year I move those photos en masse off to external storage.

I agree that some drive clean-up and de-fragmenting are good ideas, with your current HD. However these typically don't free up very much space unless you have a lot of duplicated data and unused programs that you can remove (I really don't need to keep both the original downloads and the installed copies of Lightroom 3, 4, 5 and 6 on my computer... for example!)

Next, you may want to go ahead and get an external to use as backup. Set it up to update at night when you're sleeping, so it doesn't slow down your work on the computer. In fact, you might want to get two external drives that you to alternate backups and always keep one copy off-site, just in case.

As your image archive grows over time, you may need additional storage beyond what can be installed in the computer. I have a network set up with a router and five Network Attached Storage devices (NAS). Each NAS contains four hard drives and use a RAID configuration that backs themselves up and protects data one each. The network and NAS are both very easy to set up. Upgrades are easy too... thanks to the RAID backup. I can replace any single drive, even do a "hot swap" without turning the NAS off, and it will automatically restore the data on the new drive.

Additional external drives or NAS serve me as "cold storage", for older images that have already been worked and that I need less frequent access to... that I can tolerate a little slower handling.

I've been gradually upgrading from 1TB drives to 2TB throughout. That seems a lot of data storage space! But 30+ years worth of photos need a lot of space. I've been using these NAS for over six years alraedy and, by doubling their capacity with the newer 2TB drives, should get another five or six years use out of them.

There are larger (6, 8, 10 disk and bigger) NAS, as well as smaller (2 disk). With network connectivity, they're much faster than USB 2. However, if your computer has USB 3 or 3.1, it might be just about as fast (and can read and write at the same time, the same as a network).

So, you have a number of different possible solutions. It's just a matter of deciding what will work best for you.

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

I've been using WD externals for several years with little or no problem. A good brand.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Solid State Drives are very fast... but are NOT recommended for long term storage of important data. This from a friend of mine who is a manager and production engineer for one of the top manufacturers of SSDs and HDs. They've gotten better, but do not have the reliability to store irreplaceable data securely. SSDs also are still quite expensive compared to standard HDs.

Kuzano

Presuming none of these drives that are getting tended to are SSD drives....

You NEVER defrag an SSD Drive.

You Always turn OFF File Indexing in the properties of any SSD drive.

These functions... defrag and running file indexing are counter productive to the life span of SSD drives...

And please note that the default for Windows for File Indexing is "ON". It needs to be turned "OFF" on SSD drives.

Brian in Whitby Loc: Whitby, Ontario, Canada

I second that. You might consider using an external drive in addition for backup.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

RT - the Passport and other consumer oriented drives are really cheap and cheaply made. I suggest getting a USB 3 drive enclosure (about $30 or less) and a WD Black or RE series drive. The Black is a performance oriented drive for gamers and video editing, and the RE is an enterprise-class drive used in data centers, servers, etc - for mission-critical zero downtime applications. The RE is robust enough to be certified for RAID arrays which are particularly demanding on a drive. Both of these drives come with a 5 yr., no questions asked, overnight replacement warranty. I have been using these and recommending them for years and they have proven themselves over and over again. They cost more than the cheap stuff, but they are faster and more reliable.

By all means, off load your images to an external drive, then make a copy of that on a second external drive - to be safe.

If you anticipate even greater storage needs or want better performance from an external drive, consider looking into Synology NAS products. Sophisticated, easy to manage, and that Personal Cloud Server app is hard to live without. Many of their boxes offer modular design and expandability, and Link Aggregation so that if you have two gigabit ethernet ports on your computer, you can plug them both into the box for faster throughput.

It all depends on your energy level, budget, and desire for sleep at night. I would not be able to sleep if my data were on Passport or My Book drives.

rthompson10

All,

Thanks for the advice. Taking action- SSD drive, large data drive for data and getting backups squared away

Thanks again

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Agreed....