Topic: Full Disk Drive

[GillE]

I received a warning message that my 1TB HDD is almost full.  I ran WinDirStat and found 664.3GB of this is 'apps'*!  Is this normal?




*Remember when we used to call them 'programs'?  Ah, the good old days...

[Clive]

Put it like this Gill, my computer has a 1Tb HDD and I have nearly 700Gb free after exactly three years.  It contains the entire contents of my old Acer, Netbook and Mrs Clive's Dell laptop and I've added a lot of stuff to it as well.  Unless you are using lots of huge apps it does seem a bit unusual.

[GillE]

I copied 100 GB of files to an external HDD.  When I checked again, the total storage taken up on my PC was 158 GB.  Nice one, Microsoft!

 

[Simon]

That would certainly be a huge amount to have just with apps, Gill.  I recently run out of space on my old hard disc drive, so I swapped it for an SSD, and not only does the computer run a lot faster, I also freed up some more space as well.

[GillE]

How easy is it to export the program files from a HDD to a SSD?  I'd love to do that but I'm not confident I wouldn't muck it up.

[Simon]

I was also trepidatious, Gill, but I purchased a Crucial 120Gb SSD drive, which came with instructions on how to migrate an existing system to the new drive, using the Acronis clone tool.  As I already have Acronis on board for backups, I didn't need to install Crucial's version, so used the Clone tool as instructed to clone my existing C drive to the new SSD.  The clone job took about 18 minutes, which worried me, as I thought it was going to take much longer for an 80Gb drive, but I thought I'd go with it and see what happened, as all I needed to do then was physically swap the current hard drive for the new SSD.  Had it all gone to pot, I would have still had the original drive which I could have popped back in, plus I had a backup on a separate backup drive, so I had nothing to lose, really, as all of my data was on other drives, and the C drive only had Windows and programs on it.

Once I'd completed the migration, I fired up the PC, and was pleasantly shocked that it all worked fine, with the OS and programs all intact.   

[GillE]

That sounds about as smooth as you could have hoped for  .  I may consider an upgrade when finances allow.  Right now I'm more concerned about my RAM.  When I purchased the computer I was told it came with 8GB RAM which I assumed was split between two 4GB cards.  It wasn't  .  I think adding matched RAM is more of a priority than a new SSD drive, but wouldn't it be nice to have both?

[Clive]

When I specified my laptop from PC Specialist I was told there was little point in installing more than 8Gb of RAM.  But I did go for a 1 Tb SSD.  Several months later I ordered an almost identical machine for my eldest grandson who uses it for gaming.

[GillE]

My computer is from PC Specialist too (although I bought through eBuyer) and I was told that it would be ideal for processing images and videos because it was a gaming machine.  It isn't; my graphics programs (Affinity Photo & Adobe Photoshop Premier/Express) take ages to load. Processing images and videos is really slow too.

[Clive]

Can I ask how much you paid for it Gill?  The ones I bought were around £1000 each with  Intel Core i7 chips.  I've never bought anything from ebuyer so don't know anything about them. 

[daveeb]

My computer is from PC Specialist too (although I bought through eBuyer) and I was told that it would be ideal for processing images and videos because it was a gaming machine.  It isn't; my graphics programs (Affinity Photo & Adobe Photoshop Premier/Express) take ages to load. Processing images and videos is really slow too.

I've also got a PCS laptop (3 or 4 years old now) and it's still pretty nippy at processing files. It's an i7, I don't think being a gaming machine would offer any extra advantage as it's the CPU that does the bulk of the work.

[Clive]

Hadn't realised so many people on this forum had PCS computers.  I went to them because I could choose my own specification.  The plan was to buy a Dell but they weren't doing SSD drives at the time and Mrs Clive's Dell was saying the hard drive was about to fail.  Three years on and the Dell still works, the PCS has become mine and Mrs Clive now has an iPad.  Number one grandson has had a PCS too so it's what is known as Happy Families. 

[daveeb]

Hadn't realised so many people on this forum had PCS computers.  I went to them because I could choose my own specification.  The plan was to buy a Dell but they weren't doing SSD drives at the time and Mrs Clive's Dell was saying the hard drive was about to fail.  Three years on and the Dell still works, the PCS has become mine and Mrs Clive now has an iPad.  Number one grandson has had a PCS too so it's what is known as Happy Families. 

I've also got an old i7 Dell which still runs OK...but yes PCS offer a decent range of customisation and the laptop I got off them has given me less trouble than just about any other machine i've ever owned.

[Clive]

That's very encouraging Dave!