Ron Schenone

One Good Reason Not To Store Everything On Your Hard Drive – Especially Videos

Posted by on Aug 26, 2010 | 12 Comments

As many of you know, I am in Texas this week visiting the kids. Today I am trying — notice that word TRYING — to un-gunk a hard disk that has been completely filled to the brim with home videos. Let me start from the beginning. Upon our arrival on Monday evening, I was told that the household laptop was running slow. A check of the hard disk showed that it was filled, with only 1% of the drive available. This is a Windows XP machine with only a 60 GB hard disk.

I found a folder which contained 16.9 GB of video files. These were home movies of various family functions. I went down to Walmart and picked up a pack of DVDs to transfer the files to. But when you have a hard disk that has no room left for virtual memory, the process is slower than molasses. LOL.

So what is virtual memory and why is it so important? This is a very basic description:

Windows Virtual Memory is a portion of hard disk space which acts like RAM in your computer. For example, if you have a virtual memory of 100 MB, then this will act as 100 MB RAM in your computer in case your actual RAM installed is not sufficient for the CPU to carry on all the current running processes smoothly.

The bottom line is this. If you jam pack your hard drive full, there will be very limited room for your system to use virtual memory, and the system will run slowly. By removing huge files from the system, this will free up more space and will increase the efficiency of your computer.

Unfortunately this laptop I am working on also has a  virus!

I hope this helps someone out there in computer land.

  • Vincent

    You’re still using a 60GB HD on a XP computer?

    Wow… I could never cope with that. Kudos to you my man.

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      It is not mine. LOL

  • Dragoro7

    Install Ubuntu on it when your done, that’l get rid of the virus and prolong the life of the computer.

  • Hubert Paulson

    Hi:

    Are you close enough to a big box store to run in and pick up a large enough external drive to dump the videos onto to free up enough space to use for editing and burning?

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      Hi Hubert,
      This is exactly what we did. Thank you.

  • Cliffystones

    I’m working on one right now. Dual core, 1gb ram, Vista. Never set up non-admin accounts. Never paid for pre-installed Norton, or dumped it for something free. 9 viruses in the “My Documents” folders alone. At least the inside didn’t look like a clothes dryer filter :) .

    I suppose if the manufacturers did attempt to educate folks as to the problems they themselves cause due to a lack of TLC than they wouldn’t make money selling new PCs every few years.

  • Steve Silverwood

    On XP, I usually configure the system so that it uses a fixed amount of space for virtual memory. Microsoft recommends, I believe, 3x the amount of physical memory to be used as virtual memory. That way, the swap file is a fixed size (rather than growing and shrinking) and the required disk space is always allocated to VM.

    On newer systems with Win7, especially with the 500GB drive I have in my laptop, it’s not an issue. First, Win7 is =much= more efficient with the way it manages VM. Second, the amount of storage space available isn’t as much of an issue.

    And the suggestion for the use of an external hard drive is a good one. Western Digital has several in the MyBook line that are good performers and have HUGE capacities. I have three of their 1TB drives hooked up on a USB hub with all the other devices that I use when my laptop is sitting at my desk, so I just plug in the one USB cable and I’m “docked” with all that storage right at hand. I keep relatively recent files and stuff I use while away from my desk stored on my laptop, and “archive” stuff to the external drives (plus scheduled backups and so forth).

    //Steve//

  • Dick

    Laptop, Videos?
    Here’s a repair trick: Delete about 1/2 of the videos and tell them it was a hard drive problem. Probably all junk they will never look at again anyway. Presto! fixed.
    Can you tell I’ve gotten out of the repair of family and neighbors computers? Dumped all the spare parts filling a closet and bookshelves.
    After years of fixing these pesky machines, I’ve come to the conclusion that regular folks should not have computers. Just some LINUX net appliance and nothing more. They are not idiots or stupid, just not knowledgeable about computers and probably not wired to have any desire to know more about them.
    Anyway, I can’t charge them (family, neighbors) so I don’t fix them any more. I mean how many times can you look at crapped up hard drives, trashed OS’s, 12 zillion installed garbage programs, and not want to shoot the machine to put it out of it’s misery?
    So, now they all think I’m getting too old to keep up with all their “latest” stuff. Good, let them think that, then they won’t call me anymore. Just an old fart with multi-core processor, many gigs of RAM, 4 TB storage, 6 drives, media center, etc, etc. hehe. The silent phone is wonderful.

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      Hi Dick,
      I love it! Thanks for the laugh.

      I got paid. A free New York with all the fix-ins. :-)

  • Ashram

    You know, this is less about why you shouldn’t “store everything on your hard drive” and more about why you shouldn’t allow the hard drive to fill up to capacity.

    It’s semantics, yes, but you can have “everything” but still have space left over if your hard drive is large enough for that. It’s also dependent on what qualifies as “everything” to you, me and and others (subjective criteria).

    And, as you’ve found, a good solution was getting an external hard drive (possibly formatted NTFS if some of the files were larger than the file size limit on FAT32) and copying the folder containing 16.9 GB worth of files to it and then deleting the folder off the laptop hard drive to free up space for virtual memory utilization.

    However, that still doesn’t leave that much space, IMO, as it’s rather easy to fill up about 17 GB of free space these days.

    What I would recommend doing is cloning the hard drive in the laptop to a replacement hard drive and then installing the replacement into the laptop. You can use the old drive for something else, such as using it as a 60 GB external.

    There are some good freeware cloning utilities you can download that will work, such as HDClone Free. It is limited in that you can’t clone drives that are the same size or larger than the target, but as you will be likely cloning onto a larger target drive anyways, that won’t be much of an issue.

    The only challenge may be finding IDE laptop drives and an IDE external hard drive enclosure; they’re still available but definitely being supplanted by SATA.

  • http://pranav.amrute.me Pranav

    Is it just me? I thought article cut abruptly… it looks incomplete.

    • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

      Hello Pranav,
      Worked fine on my system. Firefox browser.