Harddrive nearly full

If you are just transferring files from old to new, just put it in the pc and drag and drop. Or are you getting rid of the old and want to do an image to the new drive?

Dappa1

..how to I swap most of the content from the main disk drive to the new to free up space and utilize the new disk drive...

A simple and effective strategy:

Make the new drive the home for your music files, projects, videos and photos.  Leave everything else intact, including system files and program files. 

Check that everything works before you delete the original files.  Making a backup of the deleted stuff would give you peace of mind.  Defragment both drives (maybe more than once) when you are finished.

You could gradually move a few other things later if you wish.  But it is probably not worth moving sample content unless you are adding a third drive.

Thanks all for the input

I will be putting in a new drive into the PC. Probably get a 500gb S ATA drive 7200 where Sonar X1 Studio will be moved to, from the drive that is now filling up.

Stream from the second drive do you mean the new drive (2) that I am buying or utilizing both drives to run Sonar with?

This hard drive has been good to me it's still relatively quiet on my Acer has only slowed down a fraction you wouldn't know that it is nearly full to capacity.

Imaging?
 
Would that be moving all files to the new, which I was planning to do?

You said MAIN drive so I assume it is the BOOT drive with the OS on it?


I was faced with this exact problem a few years back .... Main boot drive so full it was unable to do certain functions like defrag. It was something like a 10GB HD.... remember when 10G was huge? 

I went to the local office supply/computer hard drive vendor and looked to see what they had. I was able to find a 350G HD for a decent price that came with CLONING software. The manufacturer promised the easiest drive swap ever using the cloning software. 

"MAKES AN EXACT CLONE OF THE EXISTING DRIVE"... it said. 

I bought it, took it home, and followed the instructions exactly. 

15 minutes later, I completed the final step in the process. I turned the computer back on and it booted up on the new 350G hard drive...(fingers crossed, and holding my breath)........ my desktop was exact, my file structure was in place, all the data was there, and I only had to do an original disk re-install on one program. Everything else ran exactly like the old hard drive, but now I had 340G more space to fill up. 

It was the easiest hard drive upgrade I have ever done.... and I would recommend looking for the cloning software bundled by the drive manufacturer....!

I had to press F2 to see the new hard drive

My 1st HDD needed to be repaired (thought I had lost everything)

I will keep all programs and system info on the first and just have my projects and everything else saved on the 2nd hard drive.

Meaning OS, Sonar drive 1 (old drive)

Projects, downloads other stuff drive 2

It took three years to fill 70gb thats only because I started to down load other trials Ableton live and Reaper Saffire mixer and a few other things the other 70 odd gb is still on the first one.

But as this computer is quiet (Acer) and Sonar works well with it I see no reason to upgrade whilst its running smooth.

So thank you all for your input!

Fog

It was 60pounds reduced to 39.99 GBP

I will ttry the down load as you are right I hardly down load anything onto my computer.
 
Can tree size remove some of the bloat or does it just show you where the bloats are?

Fog

just curious, why by from maplins they are hardly cheap, some of their prices are rather steep.. try ebuyer.com dab.com etc

Overclockers is always worth checking out too.

http://www.overclockers.c...id=1660&subid=1664

The first drive is partitioned so of a 160GB hard drive partition (lets say 1) is nearly full. the other partition is at about 60gb.

So my computer has not slowed down but optimizing it for best performance is really the objective and Fog you are correct to make it as clean as possible is very important. The second drive can now take the load of my 1st hard drive.

I have noticed that it is not spinning so frantically now (disk) Seems like the beast has been tamed once and for all!

What I've done when upgrading is purchase the new drive, Unplug the cables from the old one ( used to have to re-set jumpers but that's old school) And re do OS on the new drive. Once all is good re cable the old drive as a back up and everything is still there. If your a picky housekeeper delete the Windows folder, but I never bother as the drive is a ready to go replacement still. This is all under XP, not sure if this works on Vista or 7 Of course everything is already backed to an external drive.

I use Clonezilla, it's free and works great, similar to Norton ghost.
I use it because I have a dual boot system with Linux and 4 partitions with different file system types.
It creates and restores images of all of the partitions perfectly. It runs as a live variant of Linux and knowing some unix commmands helps.