Building up 4.5TB of storage

Oh the joys of installing a new hard drive. When I bought my machine 4 years ago it came with a reasonable 160GB drive. But that was then and now most iPods and Netbook’s come with more hard drive space. To try and get over my inadequacies and regain some of my geek cred, I got my hands on a massive 1.5TB Barracuda drive from Seagate. And of course nothing spells fun like reinstalling the OS and all the applications that go along with it.

Just getting Windows installed and updating it correctly now takes the better part of a day. All those damn Windows Updates will keep you busy for hours and trying to sift through which are necessary is actually quite annoying.

But once you get that behind you then comes the fun part of putting all the apps back on. And that previously has been my downfall. Last time I wiped the slate clean I went headlong installing every app I could get my hands on and pretty soon the machine was just as clogged and a slow as it ever was. I downloaded apps and files “just to check them out” and never got rid of them. Now I have dozens of gigs worth of junk that needs to be deleted and files scattered all over the place with no structure whatsoever.

This time I’m doing it differently. I’m trying to bring order to the chaos that are my files. Old versions of apps and test files have all been trashed. Only tried and true apps are getting installed. And so far it’s been working pretty well. The machine is still quite fast on a restart and only 4 apps launch at startup. I didn’t realize just how much of a mess my previous install was until I took a step back to see which programs I was actually running on a daily or weekly basis.

As it turns out I’m only using Word, Outlook, OneNote, Firefox, Live Writer, Notepad++, Irfanview and 7zip on a daily basis. When it comes to a weekly basis it’s only DxO, JAlbum, Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Money. So clearly my palate of apps is pretty small which means I need to keep with my minimalist approach to software. Unless I plan to use it more than once I probably don’t need to install it. I do plan on getting VirtualPC loaded back up so I can test out apps without interfering with my regular OS. Probably should have been doing that all along.

I think I’m just about done installing apps, but there’s still plenty of files to move around and delete. I do have to say that O&O DiskImage has been invaluable during this process. I imaged the drive before I took it out and now I can load that image as a virtual hard drive and copy my files off it as I need them. Very handy.

And with this latest rebuild I brought all my drives online, which now gives me a total of 4.5TB of online storage. I should now have more than enough space to organize this mess and sort out where things belong.