Keeping pics and music on external HD

[returnofsid]

So, I recently upgraded from Win Vista to Win7 and LOVE IT!! Got lots of help from these forums during the course of the upgrade, THANKS!! Oh, I did a Clean Install.

Now I have another question, about my music and photo files.

Before upgrading, I put all of my photos, about 75 gigs and constantly growing, and all of my pictures, about 7 gigs, into Master Pics and Master Music files, on my external HD. External HD is a 300 gig drive, USB 2.0 capable. My internal HD is a 150 gig.

So, after doing the Clean install of Win 7, and starting to reinstall some programs, I thought, "why not save some HD space." I left the music and photos on the external HD. I've set Media Player and Shareaza to get music from, and save music to, the Master Music folder. I've set Adobe Photoshop to the Master Picture folder. In doing this, I've saved about 82 gigs of space on my internal HD. I would think this would help my computer run faster??

So my question is...

Was this the route to take? Does it even matter? Any suggestions or advice??

 

[Jonathan_King]

That's fine, you may see some better performance with a cleaner drive.

If you want, you can add the folders on the external drive in your Library.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

If I understand you correctly, you have exactly one copy of your music and photos.

If so, I think you made a bad move.

I'd keep originals on my internal drive and backups on the external.

You should get better performance when accessing the files from an internal drive rather than a USB drive.

If you were in a drive space jam, I might understand it temporarily, but only temporarily. Drive space is dirt cheap.

On the other hand, it may not matter to you at all to lose your music and photos to a hard drive failure. Even then, the USB drive is going to slow you down.

 

[returnofsid]

I should have given a lil' more information. I also back up all of my photos to a secondary external HD that is not connected at all, unless it's during a back up. All of my photos are also on my laptop, which is not the computer in question. I also back up the majority of my important photos to my online Flickr acct. So, any of my important photos are in at least 3 locations.

My thinking is that by saving room on my main hard drive (internal), it will allow my computer to run faster. The only time the external hard drive would be in use is when I'm viewing, editing, uploading pictures, or when I'm listening to, burning or downloading music. At these times, those applications might be slightly slower, by having to access the external HD. I'm not even sure it'd be any slower, as the external HD is newer than the internal, so "might" even be faster.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Offhand, I doubt if your internal drive will be "faster" just because you have more free space on it--unless it is nearly full.

The speed of access of any particular file depends to some extent on where it resides on the drive. If you move a bunch of stuff off the drive, how would you know if what is left behind suddenly moves itself to a better location? How do you propose to measure that?

I guess you could try it and find out. Personally, I wouldn't bother unless the internal drive is nearly full.