T
60 |^ |^ December 2019
he march of technology
inevitably leads to
increased demands on
your system, particularly
if you’ve discovered a
new space-hungry
hobby such as gaming or 4K video
editing. If you’re simply looking to
expand available storage for your files,
you have two basic options. The first, of
course, is to invest in additional storage.
Desktop users can investigate whether
their PC case has the room for a second
internal hard drive – with 4TB drives
shipping for under £100, you can solve
all but the most demanding needs with
a single purchase.
Before splashing out, power down
your PC, open the case and verify there’s
a spare drive bay to fit it in. Also check
your power supply has a spare SATA
power socket (see photo – if not,
Google ‘molex to sata power adapter’
to find a cheap adapter) and a spare
SATA slot on the motherboard. You’ll
also need a SATA data cable – these can
be had for under £1, but make sure it’s
SATA III (6Gbps) and consider a right-
angled connector on one end for
hard-to-reach sockets.Alternative upgrades
An internal hard drive is better than an
external model for reasons of speed, but
this isn’t always a practical option – for
example, if you have a laptop. External
drives may be more suited to long-termstorage such as backups or archiving,
but they can at a pinch be used for
day-to-day use, although it’s still a good
idea to keep frequently accessed files on
your internal drive.
If you want to go down the external
drive route, then you have two options:
USB or NAS. USB prices are incredibly
competitive – slightly cheaper, in fact,
than internal models – so you can pay
£90 for 4TB or push the boat out and
get 6TB for £120. All models should now
be USB 3.0, so for best performance be
sure to plug them into a USB 3.0 port
(typically marked in blue) on your PC.Expect to pay a small premium for
smaller, laptop-friendly 2.5-inch external
drives, or consider Network Attached
Storage (NAS) instead. These are slower,Into the cloud
Another storage location you can make use of is your
cloud provider. We’ve already seen how you can use
OneDrive to free up space on your computer, and other
providers offer similar features within their paid-for
plans – Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) calls its
equivalent Smart Sync, for example. Here you need to
navigate to a folder inside your Dropbox folder,
right-click it and choose ‘Smart Sync > Online-only’, or
browse to ‘Preferences > Sync’, select your account and
choose ‘Online-only’ to make it the universal default.
If you’d like to access Google Drive or Dropbox
folders in this way without a paid account, then for a
one-off fee (€35) you can use a brilliant tool called
Mountain Duck 3 (download a free trial from https://
mountainduck.io/). This can create a series of virtual
drives connecting to a range of online storage services
and supports on-demand access like that found in
OneDrive across all connected services. Just be sure to
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time you connect a new cloud account.Move your files
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elsewhere – on to another drive or into the cloud
Check the plethora of cables coming out of your power
supply for the L-shaped SATA power connector.Mountain Duck can mount your cloud storage as
virtual drives, with files kept online to save space.