Would an external HDD help?

JCD_Capulet

Hi folks, I need your input.

Firstly, I'm not as tech savvy as I'd like to imagine so please bear with me.

Right now I'm using my laptop which is my primary computer in the house. I use it for all day to day entertainment purposes and it's the machine which I upload, store, edit, duplicate, reformat etc images and video content which I produce (all be it at an amateur level).

Trouble is that it's really beginning to complain about everything. It runs slow, streaming movies/tv tends to lead to buffering and sometimes crashing. Not to mention the noise the fan has been making recently, whirring for about an hour at a time. Right now I'm in the middle of an editing project and the lag is chronic, so I've hung that up for the evening.

I've been using this laptop as described above for three years now.

The PC in the house which I'd rather have as the dedicated machine for work is feeling rather slow too.

So I was thinking - would removing all the work I've done on both machines to an external HDD be beneficial?

If I can figure out where to find the memory stats I'll post those up (see, told you, complete dummy with this stuff)


Thanks for reading

Ectophile

A new HDD will give you more storage, but it won't magically make a PC go faster.

That said, if your PC has very nearly run out of disk space (less than about 5% free), then clearing up a good chunk may help.

If I were faced with an unexpectedly slow computer, the first thing I'd do is bring up the Task Manager and see if there's something hogging all the CPU. Something constantly accessing the disk is bad as well, but is harder to track down.

While Task Manager is open, I'd also check that the amount of memory in use is less than the physical RAM fitted. If it's more, then performance will nosedive, and you're looking at a memory upgrade.

PCs can acquire all sorts of rubbish over the years, which can slow them down. At best, it's programs that insist on running up at start-up, even if you had no intention of using them that day. At worse, it's viruses hijacking your computer for malicious purposes.

spud17

Run through the excellent,

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2436849

closed

no, but they would be a useful place to backup both machines to

Johnmcl7

As above, it would help with improving the performance (unless they were completely out of space) but also you should not ever move data to an external hard drive that you're wanting to keep. Hard drives are fairly complex mechanical devices and can fail suddenly at any age so you should always have at least two copies of any data you do not wish to lose.

So it is still worth buying an external USB drive and backing up all your data but also keeping it on the original machine, that way if you have a drive failure (either the internal or external drives) you won't lose the data.

John

Elliott_Fox

It could speed it up a little.. Keeping all your files on a separate drive allows you to keep the system drive lean and clutter free. It would have to be a usb 3 drive for you to see any benefit though so make sure you have a usb 3 laptop.

rochja

When did you last defrag your drives? Drive access times are the monkey on your shoulder and if your data is scattered to all sectors of the universe this can have a crippling effect

macman

Fan running for an hour probably equals overheating. Open it up and clean the fan and ducting from the processor. Not a Dell Inspiron 1525 is it?
What OS and how much RAM installed?

InsideInsurance

As others have said, only if your virtually out of disc space will it make any difference to the speed of your computer.

Depending on how the HD is connected to the computer(s) it may be fairly time consuming to move the files between the drives and/ or to process the video files whilst they sit on the external drive.

Personally I have an external unit with multiple drives in it with a RAID array to give me security over drive failure. This is then connected by eSATA to my computer. When I am working on a project I move the data files to the computers internal SSD drive and then copy them back to the external drives once I am finished.

JCD_Capulet

rochja wrote: »

When did you last defrag your drives? Drive access times are the monkey on your shoulder and if your data is scattered to all sectors of the universe this can have a crippling effect

I think the last time I did a defrag was January and three or six monthly before then.

macman wrote: »

Fan running for an hour probably equals overheating. Open it up and clean the fan and ducting from the processor. Not a Dell Inspiron 1525 is it?
What OS and how much RAM installed?

Open up the laptop? :eek: here's the details of my laptop, couldn't copy and paste so posting a pic instead (sorry if that's against any rules)

InsideInsurance wrote: »

As others have said, only if your virtually out of disc space will it make any difference to the speed of your computer.

Depending on how the HD is connected to the computer(s) it may be fairly time consuming to move the files between the drives and/ or to process the video files whilst they sit on the external drive.

Personally I have an external unit with multiple drives in it with a RAID array to give me security over drive failure. This is then connected by eSATA to my computer. When I am working on a project I move the data files to the computers internal SSD drive and then copy them back to the external drives once I am finished.

That's what I was thinking about doing, but I'll see how it goes - I don't want to make any hasty decisions just yet and end up regretting it.


Thanks for the input folks

closed

defrag has been automatic for a while, not that it's likely to make the slightest difference.