Is Your Hard Drive Full, Or Nearly Full?

Hard Drive Full?

Is your hard drive full or nearly full, does your ‘C’ drive keep giving you a message that there is less than 10% of storage on it? Does it worry you that you won’t be able to install the next version of Windows 10 because your hard drive does not have enough capacity to cope with the install?

I was a bit alarmed during the last Windows update that my hard drive had less than 10% storage left on it, but then I remembered that a few years ago I had upgraded my ‘C’ drive from a mechanical drive to an SSD and that I had sacrificed storage space due to cost.

Only 220GB.

My SSD only had 220GB of storage, but the mechanical one that it had replaced was 500GB, so there was my answer, I needed to upgrade my ‘C’ drive to a much larger SSD drive and, as the price of SSD’s has come down in recent years, a much larger capacity drive was within my reach.

I looked at the drives on https://uk.crucial.com/ and settled on a 2000GB or 2TB SSD, because this will give me more than enough storage space, and will serve me well into the future when I decide to upgrade my whole machine.

The image below shows a screenshot of my PC before the new hard drive was added, and the 220GB SSD with the used capacity is showing in red, leaving only 12.6GB available, which in these days, is not a great deal of storage space.

Installing The Hard Drive.

Inside my PC case was enough room to install the new drive, in fact, there is a special mounting point for two 2.5inch drives to fit, and I had enough spare power and unused data cables, with which to attach to the drive to make it work. A quick change in the BIOS, to let the PC know that my new drive was now my ‘C’ drive, and the PC renamed my other drives automatically.

I took this opportunity to give my PC a spring clean too, by carefully removing some of the parts, and giving them a clean from all of the dust that had built up deep inside my case, I also noticed that one of my exhaust fans had stopped working, so this needed to be replaced.

After the install, all I needed to do was reinstall Windows using the DVD disc that I had made when I had upgraded to Windows 10 from 7 a few years ago, this also gave me an opportunity to not reinstall any unwanted programs that I had installed over the years, a kind of clear out if you like.

In the image above you can see my new hard drive with loads of free space and this has given me much more storage space without the need to buy a completely new PC.

My Files And Folders Were Backed Up.

I have all of my files and folders backed up in the cloud, so all I needed to do now was to restore them back to new ‘C’ drive, this was a simple task that took only a few hours to download using the software supplied by my online storage company.

Now that I have four physical hard drives installed on my PC, two SSD and two HDD, I have enough storage space to last me well into the future and I do not need to worry about running out of storage space during the next major update of Windows 10.