How to Get Past Thoughts of Making an External HD Your Main Drive

Can you make an external hard drive the main hard drive, instead of an internal? Well, at first, you'd think that the performance is going to seriously degrade, to the point of staggering performance loss. But if you are working with an older system, or perhaps you have a better external hard drive than the internal one, you might want to give it a go. Alas, this might not really be the quick fix that you would think, and there is oftentimes another underlying cause as to why you would want to do something like this, and most often, that is because your current internal hard drive is bursting at the seams.

You could start by opening the external, cloning the small drive to the larger, format the small drive and installing the smaller drive into your external, but this would be a pretty tedious task. Not to mention that most of us casual computer users wouldn't really know where to begin with something like this, either.

The transfer rate of an external hard drive is going to be roughly half of what an internal drive would be, even on older computers. There are other ways around this. You also want to consider the type of hard drive it is, because if it is a flash drive, it will wear out quicker than a regular hard drive will too. They don't tend to take to as many read and write cycles.

One can buy 320 gig Western Digital SATA drive for about 100 dollars, at least a year ago, you could. But you might have an IDE drive though, which would be even cheaper.

Regardless. Drives are cheap these days. Especially if you need an IDE drive. Buy another internal hard drive and install it, it's not very hard and you can often find instructions for this inside your computer documentation or on the web. Stick it in as your second hard drive. Back up a bootable image to it from your first drive and burn it to a DVD or DVD's. Swap them around and backup your image to the newer bigger hard drive. Reformat the old drive that is now second, and use it for storage for all your mp3 music files or anything else that you would like.

Or actually you could use your external drive to make the back up image to, then just restore it to your new drive when you install it. Still use the old drive as a slave or something and you will have two drives for storage and archival purposes. You can find a new 250 gig drive for around 50 dollars. Think of all the storage space you could have with that new set up!

But if you want an even simpler idea, ccleaner software from ccleaner.com has been known to work wonders. If your hard drive is full or nearing full, it might be time to do some swift spring cleaning. A 12gb hard drive with 3 gb full is as good as stuffed to the gills! With a drive this full, you are liable to experience some system performance problems, but it's not something that can't be fixed with a little effort!