jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

My 500GB Samsung SSD is 56% full. That isn't bad, but I see the end approaching. All I have on it are Win10 and programs. Add data is on the D drive. A 1TB Samsung SSD costs less ($140) than the 500GB drive I bought three years ago. If I get the 1TB drive, I can re-purpose the 500GB SSD for data storage. On the other hand, if I wait till the current drive is 75% full, a 1TB SSD will be cheaper and probably faster.

I think I just talked myself into waiting.

juan_uy Loc: Uruguay

Unless you are constantly downloading new (big) applications (like games). That remaining 44% should give you enough time to wait without issues.
If this still concerns you, around Black Friday you will probably be able to get the drive a bit cheaper. And at this moment you can wait.
(you are probably good with what you have for a couple of years)

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

It may be time for some spring cleaning. By all means upgrade the hard drive, but it you need to clear some space, here are a few areas people forget about:

- My Documents - Unless you specifically changed it to an alternate drive, will fill up your primary.
- Old Programs - I would normally free up gigabytes of space deleting old programs that I haven't used in a pre-determined about of time. Normally, if it hasn't been touched in 6-8 months, probably won't ever be of any real value.

And of course, routine drive maintenance of clearing cached files, etc..

Adamborz

Lol. I have a custom built desktop with 1 TB NVME SSD for boot and working. Then I switch all my stuff to a 2TB HDD. I can switch out the HDD if it gets full...I keep a back up of the SSD on the HDD. Transfer speeds from CF cards or SD cards via USB 3 is very fast to the SSD.. love it.

I recently changed my dell laptop which had a 256 GB boot SSD over to 1tB. It was a real PIA having to switch the windows 10 stuff to the new SSD. I had cloned it to the HDD but I never got it to work that way. I ended up having to reinstall everything from Dell downloads. Lucky my files were all backed to the HDD so after reinstalling windows I put my files back on.

My desktop has 64 GB of DDR4 ram... now that really speeds up editing programs...

Tronjo Loc: Canada, BC

Clean the drive up. For OS and applications you don't need more than 500GB.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Right. Cleaning out my house and garage are also on my list. : )

"My Files" has the most potential for deleting files - lots of extra stuff there. But that's all on the separate D drive. I keep looking at the C drive to see what programs I can delete, but there aren't any. Programs have gotten huge as disk space has gotten less expensive.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Your'e probably right. I'm using 266GB out of 475GB available.

jerseymike

That was interesting.

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

FYI, “My Files” gives you the least bang for your buck. All the word docs, excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations I’ve ever done amount to about 2 GB. Once I realized that I didn’t even bother cleaning them up, FWIW.

Bob Mevis Loc: Plymouth, Indiana

All the other posts on your thread have valid suggestions. If you clean up your SSD, You should have time to save some money. Black Friday would probably be your best bet.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

[quote=Adamborz]Lol. I have a custom built desktop with 1 TB NVME SSD for boot and working. Then I switch all my stuff to a 2TB HDD. I can switch out the HDD if it gets full...I keep a back up of the SSD on the HDD. Transfer speeds from CF cards or SD cards via USB 3 is very fast to the SSD.. love it.

Your running with only one backup drive?
Sounds like your removing your data from the SSD to the HDD.
That leaves you with no safety backup should that one HDD should fail.
Which they do on occasion.
An extra or two backups if you make a mistake and delete some data by accident is nice to have.
$90 buys a 4tb usb drive.
Every byte of data I have is backed up on no less than four drives.
There really is safety in numbers.

Adamborz

[quote=Mr. SONY]

Famous last words but I’ve never had one go bad. But your point is well taken. I will get an extra usb drive to back up to.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Well I used to service computers and looked into to many eyes with tears in them when they realized they just lost all their data.
Rescue disk ignorance, not their fault when they weren't warned first that a full restore wipes out all data.
Outright drive failures.
I've also seen some teared eyes through the computer when someone was begging for help and they realized their one backup drive also failed.
Happens.
Lost files. Expensive.
Multiple redundant drives, cheap.

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

How much additional space is being consumed each month/year now? I can imagine that putting the OS and programs on the drive could fill half of it up, but unless more new programs keep being added there shouldn't be much additional growth on the SSD. I'd make a note of current disk usage, and then every month or two check and see what the usage is. It may take years to get up to 75% full, in which case there's no need to do something right now.

Also, I'm now on a Mac, but IIRC from my Windows days, every Windows update left a file on the drive that was not needed to keep things running. There were many hundreds of them on the last Windows box that I retired - I didn't need the space, and so just left 'em where they were parked after each update.

One program I racall using on my Windows boxes was Spacemonger. It gave a visual display of what was on the disk, with items shown in their relative sizes, including the unused space. It was free, and was just an quick and easy way to get an overview of what was there. Sometimes I was surprised - what's THAT doing there, I thought I moved/deleted it. There may be other programs that do the same thing.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Good advice. By waiting, the price of a 2TB drive will come down more. Then you can put one of those in, and it will probably outlast the desire to use that old computer (joke!).

As you know, the SSD makes the most difference in the perceived speed of your computer. Most fast processors are held back by slow I/O operations. So if you're going to perform surgery, do it once.

I use an iMac. It's a sealed box, but various providers like OWC and iFixIt sell tools and parts to unseal it and upgrade it. About a year ago, I cracked the case open and swapped out the two 4GB RAM modules and the conventional 1TB spinning hard drive for two 8GB RAM modules and a 2TB SSD. Then I put the old drive in an external enclosure, formatted the SSD, installed all new OS and applications, updated all apps, and imported my data. The old drive went in the safe.

Those moves saved me from buying a new computer! There is nothing slow about this beast, now. It renders video seven times faster than the stock machine did. Lightroom shows similar export rendering speed increases. Booting takes under 35 seconds, instead of nearly three minutes.