How To Add Extra Storage To PC

Video games, motion pictures, images – you identify it – every little thing is quickly rising in high quality yearly. However with greater high quality comes greater storage necessities.

When a single recreation requires 100GB+ of house, your storage is sure to max out very quickly. And in case your PC is operating low on house, it should undoubtedly result in issues down the highway – both within the type of below-par efficiency or system error attributable to low disk house.

So, on this article, we’ve compiled one of the best methods to extend and optimize your PC’s storage capability.

Add Extra Storage with New Storage Media

Onerous Disks have been the go-to storage medium for many years, however most customers are beginning to change to SSDs or Cloud Storage now. In sure conditions, USB Drives or WiFi Drives could be nice choices as properly. You’ll discover all the mandatory particulars relating to these within the sections under.

Set up a New Onerous Drive / SSD

Onerous drive costs have gone down considerably and develop into more and more extra reasonably priced in the previous couple of years. If you happen to’re on the lookout for uncooked space for storing, a traditional SATA HDD (Onerous Disk Drive) offers you probably the most bang on your buck.

In order for you each storage and efficiency although, nothing beats an SSD (Stable State Drive). Particularly, the most recent PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs often vary between 250GB to 2TB by way of storage capability, with blazing read-write speeds of over 5 GBPS!

In both case, this purchaser’s information on the Greatest Onerous Drives might be helpful for those who resolve to snag one up.

Find out how to Add New HDD/SSD to Your PC

Putting in a brand new SSD onto your system could be very easy. With PCIe and NVMe SSDs, you simply plug them into the suitable slots on the motherboard.

Listed here are the steps it is best to observe for a SATA HDD/SSD:

1. Energy off your PC and open the CPU case.
2. Place the storage gadget within the onerous drive bay and securely mount it utilizing screws or a tray.
3. Join the drive to your motherboard utilizing the suitable Knowledge Cable.
4. Join the drive to the PSU (Energy Provide Unit) utilizing the SATA Energy Cable.
   
5. Flip in your PC and test if the drive is working. If it doesn’t present up, you’ll have to partition and format it. 

If it nonetheless doesn’t present up, take a look at our article on SSD Is Not Displaying Up in Bios.

Exterior Onerous Disk / SSD

Laptops today hold getting smaller and slimmer. That is nice by way of portability nevertheless it makes upgrading and including new components a nightmare. This isn’t essentially a laptop-specific problem both.

Even on desktops, generally there merely gained’t be sufficient house within the CPU case to bodily slot in a tough disk. That is the place an exterior onerous disk could be the right possibility.

Exterior Onerous Disks / SSDs provide all the identical features as the interior variants, with the additional benefit of portability and ease of use. All you’ll want to do is join the onerous drive to a USB port and also you’re good to go.

USB Drive / SD Card

Whereas these could not work as everlasting additions, a USB stick or an SD card is nice for rising your PC’s space for storing while you urgently want it. Most USB pen drives and SD playing cards today provide between 2 GB – 256 GB of space for storing.

Cloud Storage

In case your PC doesn’t have sufficient house for an inner onerous drive and carrying round a conveyable one looks as if a trouble, what possibility do you’ve? Cloud Storage.

Most customers have tried, or not less than know of, the free storage plans provided by Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. If you happen to’re trying to simply again up a number of essential information, these might be a lot. However for the rest, the paid choices (subscription-based or lifetime entry) provide a lot extra.

Among the finest Cloud Storage companies at current embrace IDrive, pCloud, Backblaze, IceDrive, and NordLocker. The paid plans typically provide storage within the vary of 1 TB – 10 TB.

Community-Connected Storage (NAS)

A Community Connected Storage, generally referred to as a WiFi Onerous Drive, could be a nice possibility for those who’re making an attempt to attach a number of PCs to the identical storage supply.

Centralized storage was a distinct segment market. However due to a pointy fall within the worth of NAS home equipment, it has develop into far more accessible to the typical person.

Nowadays, NAS drives appropriate for residence use could be discovered for costs much like these of exterior onerous drives.

Optimize Present Storage House

Optimizing out there sources is an environment friendly method to improve the out there space for storing in your system with out truly putting in any new storage media.

You’ll be stunned by how rather more house you’ll be able to truly squeeze out of your system with out spending a dime, which is why we extremely suggest making an attempt out the strategies listed under.

Delete Pointless Information

This goes with out saying, however step one to optimizing house in your PC is to delete pointless issues comparable to unused purposes, temp information, and previous information that you simply don’t want anymore. Bear in mind to clear the recycle bin as properly.

Disk Cleanup

The Disk Cleanup utility can liberate house by deleting short-term information, thumbnails, and pointless program information. To make use of it:

1. Kind disk cleanup into the search bar and press Enter.
2. Choose the drive to scrub up, choose the kind of information to take away, and press OK.
   
3. If you wish to clear up system information as properly (e.g. previous updates), press Cleanup System Information.

Mac customers can accomplish the identical factor utilizing the in-built optimization instruments.

Prolong your Onerous Drive Partition

If you happen to really feel you’re not getting the total space for storing out of your onerous drive, it’s value checking if some house is at the moment unallocated. To take action:

1. Press Home windows + R to launch Run.
2. Kind diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.
3. Proper-click the partition you need to lengthen and choose Prolong Quantity.
4. Choose and add the unallocated volumes to your chosen partition.
5. Press Subsequent, and observe the on-screen directions.

Save Backups to Cloud

Most cloud storage companies provide fully free plans of as much as 15 GBs of space for storing. If you happen to’re operating very low on storage, these can turn out to be useful. How you utilize the storage is in the end as much as you, however we suggest utilizing it to avoid wasting compressed backups because it’s probably the most environment friendly utilization.

Incessantly Requested Questions

Find out how to Verify Storage on PC?

On Home windows, you’ll be able to test space for storing from Settings > System > Storage. By default, the storage data of your system drive is displayed right here. However you should use the View storage utilization on different drives choice to test the information for different partitions as properly.

The second methodology is to make use of the Run command diskmgmt.msc and test the storage particulars by way of the Disk Administration window.

Mac customers can test the storage data from Apple Icon > About this Mac > Storage.

Find out how to Add Extra Storage to PC for Free?

As talked about above, quite a few respected Cloud Storage Service Suppliers provide 5GB – 15GB storage plans freed from value.

One draw back is you could’t retailer very giant information because the storage capability is considerably restricted. But when that’s not a problem, you’ll be able to create a number of accounts for a number of cloud storage companies, which might add as much as fairly a little bit of space for storing.