need more space on my hard drive!!! Advice needed please..

[XPTE]

I've only got just 1GB of memory left on my hard drive. And with London-Brighton addon released on Friday, by the time that's installed I'll only have about 200MB left!

So I desperately need more memory on my hard drive! I'm not an expert on PC hardware, so what's the best to get, an expansion pack or a hard drive?

[saddletank]

1) How big is your HDD?
2) What is on it? - surely there is something you don't use you can delete or compress and archive.
3) Failing the above not being possible, easiest solution is to buy another HDD.

[ianmacmillan]

As the spammers say.....

Get a big hard one.




Remember you can have two hard drives installed.

[simuk]

Don't suppose you've got any firewire ports on your PC, Marc?

[basildd]

I've only got just 1GB of memory left on my hard drive. And with London-Brighton addon released on Friday, by the time that's installed I'll only have about 200MB left!

So I desperately need more memory on my hard drive! I'm not an expert on PC hardware, so what's the best to get, an expansion pack or a hard drive?

You have a little respite - the first batch of disks is only being pressed this week so they won't be available until the 30th or thereabouts! As for hard disk space - I reached an all time low last night with a big warning saying there was 3mb left - and the systems won't function properly. A good way to get you to delete whats not necessary!

[Baily9531]

Ive zipped up all the default routes and put em on a CD, i only get this out for when installing a new route, this has saved me loads of HD space, plus ive deleted alot of unused route recently, mainly betas like carlise- glasgow and any un used or unwanted sounds and trains, surprising what space you save by having a spring clean in your trainset folder!

[ianm42]

Well, a 120Gb disk from PC World is only just over 100 quid, so you should be able to pick them up cheaper elsewhere. 80Mb or 60Mb disks will be a bit cheaper, but there is no point going smaller than that these days. If you only have one disk drive in your PC, there should be plenty of room to fit a second one, but you might need a new ribbon cable, as some suppliers are stingy and only put in a single cable when they put together a PC. They are simple to fit yourself, but I would expect you can get it fitted for a couple of quid.

[eddief]

Remember you can have two hard drives installed.

Depends on the computer tower. I have 3 hard drives in mine (20gb, 60gb and 120gb. Hoping to replace the 20gb with about 250gb at some point), and still have room for another CD drive (and yes I do have a floppy drive in there).

[DaveR]

A CD-rewiter is a good idea, you can store all the bits you want to keep off the computer and on to disc



Dave

[Hymek]

Depending on which make your computer is determins if you have room to expand your HD capacity

I only run one 20GB hard disk and i only have about 1/3rd of the stuff i want installed so i thought i would go buy another one (120GB). Luckily before i went to go buy one, i removed the side of the casing to see if there was any room for it. Thanks to TINY being stingy i can only run a 20gb hard drive, I think its time i purchased a new pc

[Dspring]

Hi Bob
Lots of technical considerations here, so I suggest your get the chosen hardware supplier to verify that your proposed upgrade will actually do the biz for you. Assuming you have an IDE set up and not a SCSI set, and assuming yoiu are on an older OS like Win98 the following should be considered. (If you have a new PC under XP it could be simpler but I assume the problem has arisen because your PC is older),
IF space is the only problem then of course a disk upgrade is right, but if it's an old spec m/c then perhaps a new m/c will give lots more benefits while also overcoming the space problem
1. Make sure you have spare power lead and that you power supply can handle the extra load of a new HDD.
2. Make sure you have a spare drive bay to install the new drive in
3. What HDD you can add depends somewhat on the Operating system, and on the BIOS on your motherboard. Older BIOS/s may not recognise more than low Gigs ~32Gb, on a HDD, so buying a big Gigs drive will only lead to unuseable space. Also older BIOS's may not handle the newer ATA100 or faster transfer speed, so your big fast new HDD may only perform as a small slow one. There's a way round this though, what you can do is add a Promise Technology Ultra 100 ATA controller Card. This card plugs direct into a PCI slot on the motherboard, and you new disk plugs into the card. The Promise card is about £40 and can take up to 4 disks. It overcomes the speed and size limitations of the older BIOS's
The system should sort out the IRQ's for the new card, but this is an area of possible conflict if you system is stuffed full of cards already.
4. Doing the above will leave your original HDD as the system boot disk, so everything should work ok and you will have lots of extra space avail on your new disk. If you want to really improve things you can change the boot disk etc, but this is likely to be a step too far at present?
5. Choose a 7200rpm spindle speed disk, to get the best speed from it
6. You may want to partition the new HDD, and it will almost certainly come with a disk that helps you do this, or something like Partition Magic can be used. So you could buy a 120 Gb disk and get two 60 Gb partitions from it etc, (Could be useful to have MSTS1 and MSTS 2 on separate partitions)
6. If you do all this it's probably worth migrating the entire MSTS from an old slow disk to the new fast one, again something like partition magic can help.

Well as you can see it's not simple, but neither is it impossible, so I suggest talking to some suppliers and asking for their help in determining exactly what will be best for you.

Personally I installed a Promise card and an IBM Deskstar 60 Gb on a 1998 vintage mobo Win98 PC and it was just fine. 60 Gb seemed massive then, but seems pathetic now.

Hope this is of some help

Dave

[Horgy]

80Mb or 60Mb disks will be a bit cheaper.

I should bloody well think so

Horgy

[XPTE]

Hi Bob

Who's Bob? Why do some people call me Bob? Odd.

Anyway, cheers for the advice everyone. Everything seems to be so expensive though and a bit beyond my budget at the mo. What would be handy is if I could get another say 7GB of extra memory on my hard drive, so that I could install a few more Train Sim add-ons and route and be able to reinstall that excellent game The Sims too.

I've cleared a few more bits and peices from my hard drive, but still only have 2.92GB left. Looks like I'll have to uninstall Pro Trains 2 and Pro Train Austrian Scenic Experience too then.

[Fodda]

Why not invest in Route Control at http:\\www.howintheworld.com

It ain't as expensive as a new drive and really compacts routes down. OK so it's at the expense of time, but it doesn't take more than a minute or two to change routes and will save you 100s of MBs per route installed. It also means you don't have the hassle of reinstalling routes that you miss, plus finding and remembering all those little patches, tweaks and activities.

And no... I don't have any interest in the company... I just like the product and think it was made for people with your problem.

[Atlantic]

I also like route control, and think it is well worth the money , I go through my favourite routes with route riter which is free, this skims some space, the routes I do not use so often i store in route control, which saves up to 500megs a route, I can then recall them quickly when needed. I have approx 30 routes in route control, taking up about 500megs on my disc in total not 500 each.