Are you running short of storage space on your hard disk?

Modern hard disks offer vast amounts of storage. Even so, it’s all too easy to fill up that space with music collections, photo archives and hour upon hour of high-definition digital video.

More to the point, if you have an older computer that’s saddled with a smaller hard disk you may be feeling the storage pinch.

Thankfully, adding more space to store your stuff has never been simpler thanks to fast, reliable and affordable external disks with ever more cavernous capacities.

We explain what to look out for when choosing a new hard disk, how to reorganise your computer’s existing internal disk to help keep your documents and data safe and secure and reveal a few strategies that will help make the most of the space you have available right now.

Make the storage you’ve got
Before adding more storage, consider the hard disk that’s already inside your PC. Hold down the Windows key and press E to launch Windows Explorer. How many disk drives do you see?

Even if there is just one physical disk inside the PC (as is likely the case), two or more disks may be displayed here. That’s because a hard disk can be split into partitions (sometimes called ‘volumes’), each behaving as if it were an independent drive. Windows assigns a different letter (followed by a colon) to identify each partition.

Unfortunately hard disks in most new PCs tend to be formatted with just one partition. This will contain Windows, its programs and your documents.

While this will be organised into folders (such as My Documents), having all the data lumped together in the same space isn’t a terribly good idea.

It’s much better to use a separate partition for your personal files and folders, as this makes backing up important data much easier.