Space, space space ! ! 

A few years back now I visited one of my Godsons and his growing family. The children were enthusiasts in playing computer games.
The problem was rather than just exiting when done, they saved the games so as to avail themselves of their presence. Rather than hunting them up to play; they kept them permanently installed.
Result was a very limited speed on their PC and they couldn’t install any more. They had about enough space on their hard drive to allow it to work at an extremely slow speed.
I explained to them that they MUST keep a certain amount of space. This was in the days of maybe 250 GB hard drives. They must realise I hammered home to them that because the PC had a 250 GB hard drive it really needed around 50 to 60 MB for its memory to work in.

Bear in mind that I had to quote figures I produced from my head. I know virtually nothing about PC internals or the way they work. I was just using figures to get them to understand that they MUST allow the hard drive some working space.

My solution — Caddies

When I got home again I started thinking about my own situation. I have many folders of historical interest and also very many JPGs. What was I going to do. My own hard drive was ¾ full with a series of negatives to be scanned that ran around 7 or 8 thousand.

The idea came into my head — use a couple of Caddies. There were enough hard drives from dismantled PCs on the market and by now the new PCs were being made and sold with 1 TB drives so that there should be some 500 GB around second-hand going at reasonable prices.

It also meant that I could save all my vitally important files on them and just transfer the whole caddy via its USB connection when I updated.

I now have with my new PC 1.5 TB of storage space. Plus another 500 GB caddy with a 2.5 inch hard drive to attach to my laptop if needed. Perhaps, but only a maybe, I shall transfer to a solid state drive when they get cheaper. Perhaps  !