• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

How much internal free space do you have left on your main PC?

Damn, I don't know how people can stand having so many drives. Is it cheaper to get more smaller drives instead of fewer bigger drives or do a lot of you prefer to just keep different things on completely different drives?
Yes and no. And small and big are relative sizes.
3 TB drives start at around 65€ here, 4 TB HDDs at 75€ , a 8 TB drive at around 165€ and a 10 TB drive at 220€, (all non-SMR) so a set of the smaller ones is indeed cheaper than a single big one. Plus the small ones can be bought over time, increasing total capacity with needs.
And yes, I do tend to keep OS/games and programs/general data/recordings on seperate drives. That way I can be sure that one isn't interfering with the other.

For my storage:
storage.png
Old Plextor M5 Pro SSD (128 GB)
Pair of Toshiba DT01ACA300 (3 TB each)
And a Seagate ST4000DM004 (4 TB)
around 10 TB in total with around 4.6 TB free.
Around 1 TB of games, 1 TB of videos, 100 GB of music, 700 GB of VMs, 200 GB of archives stuff (which comes in handy more often than thought). The question was about our main PCs, not the pure gaming rig or what we do on it ;)
 
Of course not, but I would think that after buying 4-5 add-on drives, that would be telling you to buy a bigger drive instead of more smaller ones.
The new ones tend to be bigger than the originals so that is whats happening anyway. At the time I got the 4TB's the price per gig skyrocketed for higher capacities.

This system in years gone by had a 2TB WD Green, a 640 gig WD black, a 750 gig samsung, a 500 gig seagate, those drives have all now been replaced with what I have now.

Similar with SSD, my first one was a 128gig 830, then a 500 gig 850 Pro and now I only have 1TB SSD's in here.
 
The new ones tend to be bigger than the originals so that is whats happening anyway. At the time I got the 4TB's the price per gig skyrocketed for higher capacities.

This system in years gone by had a 2TB WD Green, a 640 gig WD black, a 750 gig samsung, a 500 gig seagate, those drives have all now been replaced with what I have now.

Similar with SSD, my first one was a 128gig 830, then a 500 gig 850 Pro and now I only have 1TB SSD's in here.
I must be one of the lucky PC users that doesn't use up a lot of space quick enough to have the need to buy add-on drives. I never had to buy a new add-on drive for in a desktop or laptop with the exception of 1-2 external USB storage drives. By the time I really needed an upgrade to a bigger drive, I was already in the process of replacing the whole system with a new one, which I do about every 6-8 years.
 
Screenshot 2022-06-29 210608.jpg


My SATA 2TB (D Drive) is usually used for installing/playing with random linux distros (Not seen in windows), it also comes in handy copying game data over when i do an OS reinstall.
my "NAS" is really just a Linux VM on my ESXi server with a 10TB SATA drive passed through to it (running SMB/NFS/FTP)
 
Drives:

C: Samsung SSD 980 Pro 1TB
D: Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB
E:/F: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB
G: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB
H: Samsung SSD 970 EVO 500GB

Note: 10% Unallocated partitions for over provisioning on each drive.

View attachment 251365



Post what drives you have and post a screenshot!
holy digital hoarder!! ;)
 
I thought I'd do this just for fun for the moment.... Just added a bit more storage to my two big servers and I've got a few more things to change with my current one and a new one I'd like to put together.....

09-07-22 All the drives!!.PNG


Just the main home server to get sorted out now when all the data is transferred, I get the fun of rebuilding it..... And then I have my other daft idea to try and make happen......
 
1 SN850 500GB (OS)
1 Samsung 980 Pro 1TB (Games)
1 Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB (Games n Shit)

1657587977785.png
 
Why does anyone even need 8TB+ Of storage in your PC what the hell are you storing on it.
I have about 3TB and less than half is Steam with a ton of free space.

Depends on what you're using it for. I've got 4TB of movies and TV shows on my plex server.

Here's my main PC:
Capture.PNG


C and G are SSD. D and E are WD Black drives.
Older physical games I have created .iso files for are on the E drive, along with games I don't play as often. I've only got around 30 older games I've made .iso files for on my computer, that leaves me with roughly another 100 to go through, but I've been lazy and I'd probably have to clear some room on the E drive for them all.
Games I more frequently play go on G.
I've got all my digital pictures and phone videos on D, E and backed up on the Plex server as well. Wife would kill me if that stuff got lost.
 
I've got all my digital pictures and phone videos on D, E and backed up on the Plex server as well. Wife would kill me if that stuff got lost.
Most important data ever to any parent I think.... (being a parent of two myself) Backed up in various places and ways, couldn't bare the thought of loosing any of that data at all...
 
1.png


C [Samsung 980 Pro NVME] = OS + non-Steam Games
D [WD Black] = Programs, Android tools and Clips/Anime/Shows
E [Samsung 870 QVO]= Music
F [Samsung 870 QVO] = Photography Collection/Archive and Steam Games
 
C: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD (OS + games)
D: Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS HDD (movies)
E: Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS HDD (storage & music)
F: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD (Games)
G: Team group EX2 Elite 1TB SSD (Games)
H: Samsung 970 EVO 1TB SSD (Games)

drives.jpg
 
Dont have much plugged in, doing some cleaning/dusting.

Basically I have infinite amounts since I have so many drives. I need to get sorted. If you guys would see what I have laying around you would scream.
drives.PNG

c:samsung 3.2tb MZPKI3T2HMJM
f:samsung 970 evo 500gb
 
Last edited:
Game Storage gets pruned pretty often, it's due.
Big media grew regularly for over 20 years but growth petered out a couple of years ago and it's trickling along so it looks worse than it is. There are game folders there that may get moved to another machine in lieu of downloading another 80GB, or may just be deleted as those have short shelf lives. One update to the game can trigger an entire re-download if you move an out-of-date game folder into your Library. So I clear them out regularly. This has 2 identical clones, 3 copies total.

drives.PNG
 
Back
Top