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There isn't really a fixed relationship, if your PC runs out of physical RAM during normal operation it will start using a relatively small amount of the hard drive, but seldom more than 1GB. How much RAM do you currently have and how old is the machine? Extra RAM may speed it up a bit if you do want to add some.
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At what amount of free space on the local disc should I consider having additional RAM?
You mean, do you need a bigger hard disk? If it's only half full, then not yet, unless you are planning to start using it up by loading it up with videos etc.
However hard disks are cheap - 1Tb drives aren't much over £50.
Hope I've understood the question...
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You mean do you need a bigger hard disk? If it's only half full then not yet unless you are planning to start using it up by loading it up with videos etc. However hard disks are cheap - 1Tb drives aren't much over £50. Hope I've understood the question...
Yep, that's what I meant. (I'm a septuagenarian computer duffer!) It was just that I noticed that the WAV music files I'd got on the disc used up 1.52 GB which seems a lot out of a total free space of 20 GB. I think I'll stop saving them. They got there when I was copying cassettes onto CDs. Thanks for the advice.
Edited by L'escargot on 26/01/2010 at 09:53
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You can still save them, buy and external USB drive as suggested above. Switch it on when you want to listen to the saved files, leave it off when you don't need it.
Edited by gmac on 26/01/2010 at 09:54
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You can still save them buy and external USB drive as suggested above. Switch it on when you want to listen to the saved files leave it off when you don't need it.
Yes, Comet will sell you 1000GB ish of external storage for 65 quid, similar offers from other suppliers around:-
tinyurl.com/ygmclqv
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You can still save them buy and external USB drive as suggested above. Switch it on when you want to listen to the saved files leave it off when you don't need it.
Thanks gmac, that's what I'll do.
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It was just that I noticed that the WAV music files I'd got on the disc used up 1.52 GB
WAV files do use a lot of space - can you save them as MP3s, which take up (roughly) 1Mb per minute, or do you need Rattle-like sound quality? :-)
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Something else you can do to save a bit more space is compress the drive - in WIndows Explorer right click on the C drive, go into properties and tick the box (IIRC - sorry I don't have Windows on the laptop I'm using at the moment). It takes a while to compress everything, but I reckon you might get another 5Gb.
I don't think performance is affected, or not noticeably - yes files have to be compressed/uncompressed, but they are smaller so take less time to read/write.
Edited by Focus {P} on 26/01/2010 at 10:11
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WAV files do use a lot of space - can you save them as MP3s which take up (roughly) 1Mb per minute or do you need Rattle-like sound quality? :-)
If they have come from tapes as indicated by another post, then I would definitely recommend converting the WAVs to MP3s or WMAs. You can use Windows Media Player, or there are loads of free programs (CDex is one I used to use).
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RAM and disk are quite different things.
Disk is long term storeage where your programs and data live - you're fine with more than half the disk free.
RAM is working storage and governs the performance and the number of things that you can do at once (not the only factor CPU matters obviously). Machines without enough RAM will tend to become very slow because the computer is constantly having to shuffle things out of the (fast) RAM onto the (slow) disk in order to do any work.
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The others have covered the RAM angle here.
As for your harddrive, think about a drive upgrade when your used space hits 80%.
You shouldn't really exceed 90% of used space allowing for bad sectors and memory swapping as described.
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At what amount of free space on the local disc should I consider having additional RAM? At the moment I have 20 GB left out of 37.3 GB total. >>
Trying to keep this simple, and you will need to read up technical terms:
I agree with others who have said you have enough disk space. If you want to fit a larger disk, they are very cheap now but you have to make sure you get the correct type for the connectors on your PC (I suspect you are have IDE rather than SATA connectors).
You did post previously of having had extra RAM fitted at a well known store.
www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?v=e&t=46...8
www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?v=e&t=70...3
768MB on your XP should be sufficient, unless you are running RAM hungry apps.
Rather than spend on that old machine, I suggest that you may find it better value to look out for a new Windows 7 PC (excluding monitor).
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Rather than spend on that old machine I suggest that you may find it better value to look out for a new Windows 7 PC (excluding monitor).
Having set up a couple of Win7 machines for friends then one issue that both had is that the default retail version of Win7 HP is 64bit, and support for older peripherals and apps. is not that great. So people are having to go out and buy pointless new hardware and software because of a newer OS.
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I think the suggestion of a new machine in this instance is the classic sledge hammer to crack a nut case.
If the OP is concerned purely about disk space and everything else is working then the external drive is the answer.
It also means if they use the external drive as their personal drive then future migration to a new machine when needed is pretty straight forward.
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As a a bangernomics driver I think old computers are like old cars, it's knowing when to stop throwing money at them and move on. In this case I agree an external HDD is a much easier way forward, I'd feel happier about recommending a new PC if the OS was 32bit and there was little risk of further expenditure on new gear.
On the other hand I put a new motherboard in an old PC of mine a week ago and now it looks like the PSU has gone!
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I think the suggestion of a new machine in this instance is the classic sledge hammer to crack a nut case. >>
I beg to differ, because L'escargot is not your standard of PC user.
You can get PCs (without monitor) for around £200-£300. Remember that L'escargot has a fear of pretty much doing anything with/to his PC.
By the time L'escargot has paid his high street tech guys to fit his new HD (external or internal), extra RAM, or other bits for him, it may well cost him £150 or more.
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I agree about internal HDD or RAM, but if Mr.Snail has succeeded in copying C90s to HDD then I would think a plug and play external HDD would be a viable option. Certainly easier than trying to get the hang of Win7 and playing hunt the printer driver.
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...playing hunt the printer driver....
Ho-ho - and I thought I was the only one.
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By the time L'escargot has paid his high street tech guys to fit his new HD (external or internal) extra RAM or other bits for him it may well cost him £150 or more.
If L'escargot needed all the above doing then I'd agree but I think anyone is capable of taking a USB drive and plugging it in, installing the software provided on the CD if the hardware doesn't already detect and install the required driver.
It also provides a standalone backup facility.
OK, L'escargot is maybe not going to partition the drive, which is to be recommended for 1TB, but for simply a place to drop music files to build up a library it's a simple, cheap solution.
As with most things you can make it as simple or challenging as you want.
Edited by gmac on 26/01/2010 at 10:55
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As with most things you can make it as simple or challenging as you want. >>
;-) I think L'escargot prefers to pay, so I do know whether you would call that simple or challenging. Seven months ago, when he had a false positive from Webroot (prefers to pay rather than use freeware), he did this : ".. I‘m a computer duffer!) I took my computer to PC World for a health check and they removed all traces of the virus and re-installed the soundcard driver file. ... "
Edited by jbif on 26/01/2010 at 11:18
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I don't know how much extra RAM has been suggested (not read the entire thread) but lets say an extra 1GB of DD2, I can get some very high quality stuff for less than £20 at Microdirect. I typical would expect to make £30 profit on a job like this a 500g external drive costs £50 so you should easily be able to do all this for £100.
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"....partition the drive, which is to be recommended for 1TB,"
By who and why?
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Someone who is more proficient than what I have been lead to believe the OP is.
The reason being it makes the disk more manageable and gives more options.
It would give a drive for a music library, a separate drive for backup and perhaps another for personal documents.
Less risk of data loss through a mistaken delete when the data is on separate drives.
You could keep it all in a single drive and manage through folders, a single defrag of a 1TB chunk v that of a 250Gb partition takes a good while longer.
Edited by gmac on 26/01/2010 at 22:57
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Ah, OK. With a music/video collection approaching 1Tb I've had to migrate to a single partition 2Tb! But it's OK, it's backed up regularly and with an off-site backup.
I personally dislike partitioning just for the sake of it. Even for less savvy people - who may think they are doing the right thing by backing up to another partition - then the drive blows up.
My ideal Windows set up (and one which I have recently implemented for a much less savvy mate) is a small but fast C drive, and a large D drive. Repoint all "My Documents" folders to be created etc on the D Drive. Then get a separate 1Tb USB drive for backups.
Once in a while (monthly? - depending on change/usage), image the C drive using Ghost or Acronis - 20 minutes max - putting the images under My Documents on D Drive (Older generations of image can be deleted). Then do a Sync (e.g. use AllWaySync) to backup My Documents in it's entirety. Do interim Syncs of My Documents on a weekly (?) basis to a separate location on the 1Tb drive. The 1Tb drive can be stored off site between backups if required.
Even my wife and kids are managing to do this...
Edited by smokie on 27/01/2010 at 16:14
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... With a music collection approaching 1Tb...
Crikey, that's a lot of notes.
I reckon my collection would probably fit on an 8gb iPod, but I'll probably buy a 16gb just to be on the safe side.
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1TB! That puts my 40Gb to shame, and my wife thought I was daft! ;)
Personally, I never use back-up or imaging tools myself. I prefer to do a straight mirror (using the archive flag, so it doesn't take long after the first time), so that I'm not relying on any particular tools or operating systems to recover data.
As long as I can connect my external drive to a computer with an OS that supports NTFS, my data is there.
Although with 1TB+, I guess mirroring has its limitations!
Now, if someone wants to come along and tell me why doing a mirror is bad news, I'm all ears...
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Smokie probably uses either a very high bit rate or even non-compressed. Disk space is cheap.
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Given the usual quoted capacities, I reckon a 1Tb iPod could hold 250,000 - a quarter of a million - songs.
Or about 12 or 15 thousand CDs.
Dunno how much more space a high bit rate song takes up, but 1tb must still equate to a great deal of music.
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Its easy to take up 1TB. A lot of my MP3s use lossless compression and take upto 33MB each! 320bkps still sound good but when (whats the word?) to lossless they actually sound almost as good as my Marantz CD player.
Whats the point on going to a huge effort on making sure everything is setup correctly, each component is on its own seperate shelf only to feed it with poor bit rate MP3S. Its very much the Linn idea back in the 70's.
Edited by Rattle on 27/01/2010 at 12:05
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I understand where you're coming from. Sadly I have neither the speakers or the ears to make such high-bit rate audio worthwhile! :)
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They do, its not about the hearing range it is about whats in that limited range. Vinyl has a very limited range but it still sounds better than CD to me. With 320bkps on my setup (fairly modest but done properly) sounds very good, with lossless the soundstage widens up and you forget about the electronics it becomes all about the music. Higher bit rates get you faster bass, clearer mid range (sometimes) and a cleaner treble.
On most average setups though you're not going to notice any difference. I also limit only the albums I listen to a lot to lossless.
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Ah, with my £45 Sony 2.1 system attached to my PC, I'm not likely to be able to appreciate such subtleties!
Well there's another set of toys to put on my wish list...
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I always think £1k is the sweetspot. Budget seperates sound good but you know there is something missing, they usualy have all the detail but lack the music, more expensive ones actually place less detail because most the detail is actually unwanted disortition. You find there is actually much less going on and become involved in the instrunments and the musicians. After £1k though you have to spend more and more to get little improvement. If I had the money I would probably stop at around £4k. It just gets silly when people start spending £300+ on a cable.
The great thing now all you need is a decent sound card (around £100), a decent amp £250, and a good pair of speakers £200 and you have a great system for MP3 playing on.
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Thanks Rattle. I have next Christmas in my sights already!
Is it really necessary to have a separate sound card? I know this may sound daft, but what's wrong with the integrated jobbie my motherboard came with?
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You can use your internal sound card if you have a decent external DAC. The problem is that most built in sound cards have a rubbish quality DAC (digital to analogue convertor) so the output is very poor. I have an M Audio Audiophile sound card, cost me around £70 and the sound quality between that and the built in one is staggering. I could further improve it by adding an external DAC but they are about £200+ and I cannot justify that at the moment.
The DAC is also the difference between cheap and expensive CD players. My Marantz CD player has lots of complicated DAC chips in it and really huge capacitors to handle the output peaks even though the output voltage is so slow.
I attached a DAC to my freeview box many years ago, the problem was the sound quality was too good and you would be watching the news and hearing all sorts of backgroudn noise from the studio so it got very distracting.
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>>It's easy to take up 1TB.>>
Not that easy...:-)
When do you find time to listen to all this music as well as enjoying the latest output?
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I have virtually no FLAC. I too have slightly duff ears (medically proven), so as long as it is loud, the quality doesn't matter so much :-) I have a 160Gb iPod, which I use either with some nice Sennheiser noise cancelling headphones or some Koss in-ear ones. No wonder I'm mutton.
The collection started mostly as 128k but I am slowly replacing with 320k.
And as a further aside for the nerdy types amongst us - I use a Western Digital Mybook World Edition NAS to store it all on. It was nearly out of space, as that's also where everyones backups go too. The NAS can have a further USB external drive. I have spent over a week learning about this device, which runs on Linux, and I now run a web server on it, as well as a number of other useful applications. I learnt about it so that I can replace the 1Tb drive with a 2Tb, which is now done. Rync has been copying my data to it's external 2Tb since the weekend and is only up to L in my library (and what with all the music in Various Artists, and band names that begin The, it isn't yet half way!)
The spare 1Tb drive coming out of the NAS is probably going to go into the V+ box to increase TV recording capacity.
I use a synchronise tool (as mentioned above) which dramatically reduces backup time - but only copying one way, not a two-way mirror. IMO two-way would be dangerous in my case, as if the target drive started to pack up (say a bad cluster in the file table) then I would synchronise deletions back to my "master" set when I don't want to. Although I do have a third backup of most stuff :-)
I didn't know imaging was included in Win 7 - that's handy!
Edited by smokie on 27/01/2010 at 16:13
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By contrast, my musicathon would be fizzled out in a mere 20 days.
You must own just about every album ever published?
Incredible.
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Yep, it all became a bit of a sad obsession. I recognise that. I have three or four non-mainstream genres so there is plenty of scope for finding new stuff. And I tend to listen to the same old stuff rather than the new!!
Did I mention my karaoke collection? :-) And I HATE karaoke...
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Obsession is merely the melting pot from which genius is brewed... ;)
I would play the "have you got" game from my more obscure album collection, but I can see I will be beaten hands down!
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Sorry guys, on reflection I have edited/hidden some of this discussion. Sorry if your post got lost anyone.
Edited by smokie on 27/01/2010 at 16:20
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You need a Drobo with a Drobo share. Nice kit that allows you to swap/upgrade drives and it rebuilds/reorganises. But there are downsides on how overheads work - you could swap a drive and not get more space.
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Drobo is nice but way too pricey for me. Also with a "proper" backup regime I don't really need to spend on redundant disks in a RAID - make 'em all work for a living!
This massive disk copy is a once-off exercise that should be over by the weekend. After that it's just one way syncs which makes maintenance very quick.
However, I've been browsing these new fangled solid state drives. I would think 64Gb would be ample for a C drive, and I imagine it would make Windows really fly.
Having just given up the fags (again), I can probably justify one in a few months time...
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However I've been browsing these new fangled solid state drives. I would think 64Gb would be ample for a C drive and I imagine it would make Windows really fly.
I've just cleaned my C drive down today. It was at 65Gb with 1 months worth of restores and an 8Gb Pagefile.
After cleaning up now down to 22.4Gb - Vista64 Home Premium. Pagefile switched off as I don't need it.
Edited by gmac on 27/01/2010 at 18:27
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I agree on SSDs and cigarettes. For those in the US, Smokie means cigarettes by fags.
But some Intel SSDs have had problems.
To answer the very original questions. I don't think the OP had a problem ;-) Plenty of disk space for now.
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Once in a while (monthly? - depending on change/usage) image the C drive using Ghost or Acronis - 20 minutes max - putting the images under My Documents on D Drive (Older generations of image can be deleted). Then do a Sync (e.g. use AllWaySync) to backup My Documents in it's entirety.
Having poked around with Win7 HP for the first time in the last week it's nice to see that finally all versions of the OS have disk imaging backup included, indeed if you don't create an image of C: within a couple of days of starting up the machine it starts nagging you as only Windows can.
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My ideal Windows set up (and one which I have recently implemented for a much less savvy mate) is a small but fast C drive and a large D drive. Repoint all "My Documents" folders to be created etc on the D Drive. Then get a separate 1Tb USB drive for backups.
That's what I go for too.
OS on the C drive nothing else.
Problem with Vista and Win7 is they both drop none moveable system files towards the top or end of the partition. You can then only shrink to the last point. I'm going to have to do a restore to get Vista to move these files so I can do another round of shifting unless anyone knows...that's for a separate question.
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I beg to differ because L'escargot is not your standard of PC user.
:-D
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>> I beg to differ because L'escargot is not your standard of PC user. >> >>
:-D >>
L'escargot: You asked a very difficult question, if judge it by the replies generated (and that is without counting those that were hidden/deleted by smokie).
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L'escargot: You asked a very difficult question if judge it by the replies generated ........
No probs. It was just my way of letting you know I wasn't offended by you inferring that I was a sub-standard PC user.
;-)
:-D
Edited by L'escargot on 28/01/2010 at 09:39
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No probs. It was just my way of letting you know I wasn't offended by you inferring that I was a sub-standard PC user. ;-) :-D >>
;-) Sub-standard? No way.
I should have said "computer duffer" using your own words. :-D
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