rthompson10 wrote:
My dell desktop where I've been storing/editing all of my pix has run out of hard drive space, to create space now while I decide on a fix I've offloaded onto a little passport backup drive. I think my best bet is to get and external hard drive and move all my photos to that
Thoughts? Also aware that I probably need additional backup in addition to the passport drive
Thanks!
RT
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.