extra drive space : Java Glossary

If you packrat music, digital movies or images, you may well fill up your 1 TB (Terabytes) hard drive. If you just collect text and programs, this will probably not happen to you. What can you do if you run out of space?

1. Buy a second hard drive

   They are now very cheap. Just pop it into a spare slot in your desktop and hook up power and SATA (Serial ATA) cable. If you have a laptop, you probably don’t have a spare slot. You can buy an external hard drive and connect it via a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port. The external route is much more expensive and not as fast.

2. Get a removable drive

   This is just a cage to hold an ordinary hard drive and let you insert and remove the drive with the power on.

3. Use a cloud service

   Subscribe to a service that lets you store your excess data on a server somewhere on the Internet. This is relatively expensive. The advantage is the company handles backup in a professional way for you. The disadvantage, is if the company goes out of businesse or drops the service you lose everything.

4. Burn your excess files to DVD (Digital Video Disc)

   The problem with this approach is you must have a filing system for your DVDs (Digital Video Discs) and must find the DVD containing the file you want and manually insert it. Count on a minute or so to retrieve a file.