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Step 25External Memory
Many people seem to have a hard time with this, but move all your media files and other large items to your hard drive!
Just a side note: Storing your personal files in the root of your hard drive also slows the computer down because it has to search through more folders to get to the programs and system folders.
Adding an External Hard Drive to your computer will allow you to clear out a lot of the things you don't need to be storing on your normal hard drive. A great example would be your music or pictures. All those songs and pictures are sitting on your computer, making it run slower. You will see a decline in your computers performance as soon as you use over three fourths of your hard drive space. Moving all your songs or pictures to your external hard drive will free up a lot of room on your main hard drive. You can even move applications such as Photoshop or games. An external hard drive is also handy because it is portable. You can unplug it from your computer and take it to a friend’s house and plug it in there, sharing photos and pictures very easily. This is truly a great way to make a computer run faster.
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If hard drives are out of the question for you, or you just don't need to store that much memory, a flash drive is the way to go! Storage ranges from 64 MB to 128 GB. Here's the Pros and Cons:
Advantages
Flash drives are impervious to scratches and dust, and mechanically very robust making them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand. Most personal computers support USB as of 2009.
Flash drives also store data densely compared too many removable media. In mid-2008, 64 GB drives became available, with the ability to hold many times more data than a DVD.
Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for low capacities are small and light.
Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. The flash drives present a simple block-structured logical unit to the host operating system, hiding the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. The operating system can use any file system or block addressing scheme. Some computers can boot up from flash drives.
Some flash drives retain their memory even after being submerged in water, even through a machine wash, although this is not a design feature and not to be relied upon. Leaving the flash drive out to dry completely before allowing current to run through it has been known to result in a working drive with no future problems. Channel Five's Gadget Show cooked a flash drive with propane, froze it with dry ice, submerged it in various acidic liquids, ran over it with a jeep and fired it against a wall with a mortar. A company specializing in recovering lost data from computer drives managed to recover all the data on the drive. All data on the other removable storage devices tested, using optical or magnetic technologies, were destroyed.
Disadvantages
Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive to run application software or an operating system. To address this, as well as space limitations, some developers have produced special versions of operating systems (such as Linux in Live USB) or commonplace applications (such as Mozilla Firefox) designed to run from flash drives. These are typically optimized for size and configured to place temporary or intermediate files in the computer's main RAM rather than store them temporarily on the flash drive.
Most USB flash drives do not include a write-protect mechanism, although some have a switch on the housing of the drive itself to keep the host computer from writing or modifying data on the drive. Write-protection makes a device suitable for repairing virus-contaminated host computers without risk of infecting the USB flash drive itself.
A drawback to the small size is that they are easily misplaced, left behind, or otherwise lost. This is a particular problem if the data they contain are sensitive (see data security). As a consequence, some manufacturers have added encryption hardware to their drives -- although software encryption systems achieve the same thing, and are universally available for all USB flash drives. Others just have the possibility of being attached to key chains, necklaces and lanyards.
Compared to other portable storage device, for example external hard drives, USB flash drives have a high price per unit of storage and are only available in comparatively small capacities; but hard drives have a higher minimum price, so in the smaller capacities (16 GB and less), USB flash drives are much less expensive than the smallest available hard drives.
Source: Wikipedia
________________________________________
To cheap to buy a hard drive? You can get 25 GB of storage free by using this online system called Sky Drive. This is meant to store and share your files easily over your web browser so there is no space taken up on your computer! (Besides the cookies of course.)
You can keep the files safe under your password, and access it anywhere you have an internet connection. It's easy to use, just drag files into your online folders, just like on your PC.
NOTICE: I am always rather weary of storing pictures, files, or anything on a website. I would strongly recommend only using this in conjunction with your hard drive so you have a hard copy.
Just a side note: Storing your personal files in the root of your hard drive also slows the computer down because it has to search through more folders to get to the programs and system folders.
Adding an External Hard Drive to your computer will allow you to clear out a lot of the things you don't need to be storing on your normal hard drive. A great example would be your music or pictures. All those songs and pictures are sitting on your computer, making it run slower. You will see a decline in your computers performance as soon as you use over three fourths of your hard drive space. Moving all your songs or pictures to your external hard drive will free up a lot of room on your main hard drive. You can even move applications such as Photoshop or games. An external hard drive is also handy because it is portable. You can unplug it from your computer and take it to a friend’s house and plug it in there, sharing photos and pictures very easily. This is truly a great way to make a computer run faster.
________________________________________
If hard drives are out of the question for you, or you just don't need to store that much memory, a flash drive is the way to go! Storage ranges from 64 MB to 128 GB. Here's the Pros and Cons:
Advantages
Flash drives are impervious to scratches and dust, and mechanically very robust making them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand. Most personal computers support USB as of 2009.
Flash drives also store data densely compared too many removable media. In mid-2008, 64 GB drives became available, with the ability to hold many times more data than a DVD.
Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for low capacities are small and light.
Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. The flash drives present a simple block-structured logical unit to the host operating system, hiding the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. The operating system can use any file system or block addressing scheme. Some computers can boot up from flash drives.
Some flash drives retain their memory even after being submerged in water, even through a machine wash, although this is not a design feature and not to be relied upon. Leaving the flash drive out to dry completely before allowing current to run through it has been known to result in a working drive with no future problems. Channel Five's Gadget Show cooked a flash drive with propane, froze it with dry ice, submerged it in various acidic liquids, ran over it with a jeep and fired it against a wall with a mortar. A company specializing in recovering lost data from computer drives managed to recover all the data on the drive. All data on the other removable storage devices tested, using optical or magnetic technologies, were destroyed.
Disadvantages
Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive to run application software or an operating system. To address this, as well as space limitations, some developers have produced special versions of operating systems (such as Linux in Live USB) or commonplace applications (such as Mozilla Firefox) designed to run from flash drives. These are typically optimized for size and configured to place temporary or intermediate files in the computer's main RAM rather than store them temporarily on the flash drive.
Most USB flash drives do not include a write-protect mechanism, although some have a switch on the housing of the drive itself to keep the host computer from writing or modifying data on the drive. Write-protection makes a device suitable for repairing virus-contaminated host computers without risk of infecting the USB flash drive itself.
A drawback to the small size is that they are easily misplaced, left behind, or otherwise lost. This is a particular problem if the data they contain are sensitive (see data security). As a consequence, some manufacturers have added encryption hardware to their drives -- although software encryption systems achieve the same thing, and are universally available for all USB flash drives. Others just have the possibility of being attached to key chains, necklaces and lanyards.
Compared to other portable storage device, for example external hard drives, USB flash drives have a high price per unit of storage and are only available in comparatively small capacities; but hard drives have a higher minimum price, so in the smaller capacities (16 GB and less), USB flash drives are much less expensive than the smallest available hard drives.
Source: Wikipedia
________________________________________
To cheap to buy a hard drive? You can get 25 GB of storage free by using this online system called Sky Drive. This is meant to store and share your files easily over your web browser so there is no space taken up on your computer! (Besides the cookies of course.)
You can keep the files safe under your password, and access it anywhere you have an internet connection. It's easy to use, just drag files into your online folders, just like on your PC.
NOTICE: I am always rather weary of storing pictures, files, or anything on a website. I would strongly recommend only using this in conjunction with your hard drive so you have a hard copy.
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Jul 20, 2009. 2:37 PMBriguy9
says:
That's scary, There's a flash drive that has more capacity than my integrated internal hard drive.
Reply
Jul 20, 2009. 2:37 PMBriguy9
says:
And I think I have 100GB
Reply
2
Nov 27, 2010. 6:45 AM_Scratch_
says:
yea, recently Kingston came out with a 512GB flash drive. It isn't available in the US yet as far as I'm aware, though.
Reply
Jun 14, 2009. 1:05 PMTommy8754
says:
now theres SSD's they are faster because they are solid state drives and there are no moving parts unlike the traditional HDD
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