Will buying an external hard drive help?

Question

My Windows (C:) is full and I tried many things to clear up some space and they all just barely gave me free space. Will buying an external hard drive help me out? 

Answer 1

It might. If the bulk of files in C: is from your files then transferring them to an external drive will allow you to free up space. If what's filling the C: drive however are programs, games and clutter from the OS and internet, no, an external drive won't help much.

Answer 2

Yes and no.  If you can actually move stuff off the C drive to a second drive, then yes it will absolutely help you.  But if that is all a bunch of game files, you can't move them unless you back up the saved game files, de-install the game, and then reinstall it to the secondary drive.  You can't just move an installed file.

Answer 3

Yes, you can buy hard drive.

Answer 4

A 4TB, would be better, to backup, all of your data onto. If your main drive fails, you will lose all of your data!

Answer 5

I used a "linking" utility and soon found out that lots of things can't be move easily, like your User Directory or Program locations.  So if it isn't simple data like photos and videos, I think trying to do this will eventually lead to some failure.

Cloning the drive is well understood, so I would go to a bigger drive.

Answer 6

It might. If the bulk of files in C: is from your files then transferring them to an external drive will allow you to free up space. If what's filling the C: drive however are programs, games and clutter from the OS and internet, no, an external drive won't help much.

Answer 7

just get a bigger hard drive and replace the one you have now with it; then move everything from the old drive to the new one using mirror software .. drives are dirt cheap these days

Answer 8

Maybe.  If it's movies that's filling up your C: then an external drive would certainly help.

Answer 9

Maybe?

Most people use an external drive to make a copy of what's on their computer's hard drive, as a back-up.

To free up space, you'd have to set the external drive not to back up, then move large files to it.

Depending on what's filling up the C: drive, there may be better solutions. Is it word processing, numerical data, music, images, movies, games, or what?

Or you could spend a little money and get the paid level of DropBox or one of its competitors and move a lot of your big files to the cloud.