At what point is it worth cutting files from a 120 Gb hard drive? If half full will sending some over to...?

Question

an external hard drive speed up the whole system? At what point is it worth getting an external hard drive?

Answer 1

You need about 15% to run defrag. So once you past 102 GB (85 %), delete those non-important files or move them to CD or DVD.

Instead of an external HDD, why not add an internal one?

It is better to partition a large physical HDD into many (4 or 5) smaller logical drives. That way, you can save music to one, video to another, photos to a third, and so on. AND it will be easier on the computer as far as access of these files are concerned. Faster access too, since the OS wouldn't have to search for the various parts of a file over 120 GB but only over, say, 20 GB.

Windows XP comes with the program to 'cut up' a drive.

Answer 2

You won't have any problems until you get to about 3 gb of space left, you have to have some room for the page file.

Other than that deleting files really won't speed up the hard drive, but you may want to defrag it.

Attaching an external hard drive via usb will actually slow things down a little. If you still have room I wouldn't worry about it, windows will warn you too if you are too low.

Answer 3

that is totally up to you and how important to you those files are? how is anyone of us supposed to have any idea? if you have files you want to save or back up use a cdrom and copy them to a cd or dvd for backup.

you can run disk defragmenter, and try the disk cleanup routines as well. disk space is not a primary factor in system speed until there is less than about 10% free ... say you get down to 12-15GB, but you should not get so close.

attaching an external drive will not slow down your system. all the system files and programs are on your system disk and not affected by external drives.

Answer 4

sure you are able to set up video games and the different software with exception to the OS to the exterior demanding stress. purely be certain to assign a stress to the exterior stress first, something like Z. What takes position in case you do not and initiate plugging in different units like an MP3 participant the letters of the exterior units replace and also you lose the flexibility to be able to get entry to the software put in on the exterior stress. once you've software already put in on the stress then eliminate it by the administration Panel upload/eliminate software, save any information that you've created i.e. video games Saves to a Temp folder first then use Disk manager to assign a sparkling stress letter. once you've recommended Disk manager to assign a stress letter the exterior stress will continually be realize with that stress letter and consider no complications once you plug in different units. Then purely set up all software to the exterior stress and replace the kept information to the folders that were in to start with. I somewhat have put in software on to my exterior stress and function had no problems with utilizing the software.