Help! Hard drive full.

Nick77 · « **on:** 6 Apr 2009, 07:53 pm »

I need some help with loading music on my hard drive. I use EAC to copy wav files to my hard drive to "my music" but my c drive is full. I installed a second sata drive ( F drive) with 160 gig but how do I access that for my music files?
Can I move my entire "my music" folder to my f drive? Or do I just start to designate F drive moving forward?
I download to "my music" and then it just appears in my squeezecenter file, will I have to change some settings in squeezecenter also?

Sorry for the NoOb questions.

JimJ · « **Reply #1 on:** 6 Apr 2009, 07:55 pm »

Have you already formatted the new drive?

Nick77 · « **Reply #2 on:** 6 Apr 2009, 07:57 pm »

Yes its operational, I put my office on it already.

richidoo · « **Reply #3 on:** 6 Apr 2009, 08:22 pm »

Copy the files out of My Music and paste them into a new directory (call it whatever you want) on the new hard drive. Leave the My Music directory on the C drive.

Then open squeezecenter and point it to the new drive for the music library. It will rescan. After you get it all working satisfactorily, you can delete the old music files from the My Music directory on C:\, but leave the empty My Music folder there.

Download your new music to the new drive.

Nick77 · « **Reply #4 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 12:14 am »

Quote from: richidoo on 6 Apr 2009, 08:22 pm

Copy the files out of My Music and paste them into a new directory (call it whatever you want) on the new hard drive. Leave the My Music directory on the C drive.

Then open squeezecenter and point it to the new drive for the music library. It will rescan. After you get it all working satisfactorily, you can delete the old music files from the My Music directory on C:\, but leave the empty My Music folder there.

Download your new music to the new drive.

Sweet! Just like clockwork, thanks Richidoo. Now i have 160 gigs to fill. aa

richidoo · « **Reply #5 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 12:27 am »

Have fun Nick!

rtate · « **Reply #6 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 11:01 am »

why do you have to leave the empty "My Music" folder on C drive??

zybar · « **Reply #7 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 12:06 pm »

Another way to do this is to leave the music in its original location and simply create a shorcut in that location that points to the folder on the new drive.

I do this with my setup and have no issues.

George

mcgsxr · « **Reply #8 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 12:26 pm »

Agreed about the shortcuts.

I have ~850GB of FLAC across 3 drives on my dedicated music PC/server in the basement.

As the price of drives drops, I will eventually pony up for a 1TB drive, but at present, the old 200, 300 and 500 are doing just fine.

JimJ · « **Reply #9 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 01:32 pm »

Quote from: mcgsxr on 7 Apr 2009, 12:26 pm

Agreed about the shortcuts.

I have ~850GB of FLAC across 3 drives on my dedicated music PC/server in the basement.

As the price of drives drops, I will eventually pony up for a 1TB drive, but at present, the old 200, 300 and 500 are doing just fine.

Those new 2TB Caviar Greens are looking awfully tempting

richidoo · « **Reply #10 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 01:44 pm »

Nicks C drive was full. A shortcut in Squeezecenter would not fix that.

My Music is a directory created by Windows, subdirectory of My Documents, which has registry connections to allow the username to replace "My" in certain views. I don't like to change windows original installation unless there's a good reason, especially on someone elses machine. He may want to use My Music folder again someday.

Nick77 · « **Reply #11 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 02:07 pm »

Quote from: richidoo on 7 Apr 2009, 01:44 pm

Nicks C drive was full. A shortcut in Squeezecenter would not fix that.

My Music is a directory created by Windows, subdirectory of My Documents, which has registry connections to allow the username to replace "My" in certain views. I don't like to change windows original installation unless there's a good reason, especially on someone elses machine. He may want to use My Music folder again someday.

Thanks for clairifying, I was even getting error messages that my HD was full and to delete some programs. I could not even run defrag because there wasnt enought space on the drive. Moving the files freed up 20gig on my C drive and things seem to be running better and no more error messages.

Thanks again.

richidoo · « **Reply #12 on:** 7 Apr 2009, 03:05 pm »

That's good. Windows requires some elbow room on the hard drive for virtual memory. You can look in your virtual memory settings to see how much. 1GB is probably enough but Vista is a resource hungry OS.

satfrat · « **Reply #13 on:** 25 May 2009, 08:32 pm »

I would like to expand on this topic. In my case, I have 32G remaining on my 750G secondary drive and 34G remaining on my 750G exterior hard drive. I use J. River Media Center 13 and I have the playback setup with zero spacing between songs or album picks. I use a custom HTPC with 1 Ethernet connection that I use for my DSL router and 6 USB ports, all of which being used. I have 2 exterior hard drives, the one 750G backup library HD and a 40G hard drive that I'm using to backup my C-drive(saves space on my secondary drive).

I am undecided as to what my next move should be. I could replace both 750G hard drives with 1T but then I have 2 unused 750G hard drives. I know nothing about multiple hard drive setups and how it'll affect the playback features of my J. River. I don't want to lose the responsiveness of my playback, primarily the "radio" feature of the J. River that allows for random playback (w/ changable parameters) of my library. Using 1 interior hard drive for the whole library works great with J. River so replacing this setup with something else that will work just as good is really what I'm looking at. Being able to continue using both my 750G hard drives and add more hard drives to the library w/o losing any present playback performance would be ideal, I just don't have a clue as to how that's accomplished.

Help?

Cheers,
Robin

JerryM · « **Reply #14 on:** 25 May 2009, 08:58 pm »

Quote from: satfrat on 25 May 2009, 08:32 pm

I would like to expand on this topic. In my case, I have 32G remaining on my 750G secondary drive and 34G remaining on my 750G exterior hard drive. I use J. River Media Center 13 and I have the playback setup with zero spacing between songs or album picks. I use a custom HTPC with 1 Ethernet connection that I use for my DSL router and 6 USB ports, all of which being used. I have 2 exterior hard drives, the one 750G backup library HD and a 40G hard drive that I'm using to backup my C-drive(saves space on my secondary drive).

I am undecided as to what my next move should be. I could replace both 750G hard drives with 1T but then I have 2 unused 750G hard drives. I know nothing about multiple hard drive setups and how it'll affect the playback features of my J. River. I don't want to lose the responsiveness of my playback, primarily the "radio" feature of the J. River that allows for random playback (w/ changable parameters) of my library. Using 1 interior hard drive for the whole library works great with J. River so replacing this setup with something else that will work just as good is really what I'm looking at. Being able to continue using both my 750G hard drives and add more hard drives to the library w/o losing any present playback performance would be ideal, I just don't have a clue as to how that's accomplished.

Help?

Cheers,
Robin

Hey Robin,

Given other upgrades to your system, how about this? At first blush it appears you already have more storage, but with the swappable drives, maybe not.

Worth a look, IMHO.

Have fun,
Jerry

zybar · « **Reply #15 on:** 25 May 2009, 09:24 pm »

Quote from: satfrat on 25 May 2009, 08:32 pm

I would like to expand on this topic. In my case, I have 32G remaining on my 750G secondary drive and 34G remaining on my 750G exterior hard drive. I use J. River Media Center 13 and I have the playback setup with zero spacing between songs or album picks. I use a custom HTPC with 1 Ethernet connection that I use for my DSL router and 6 USB ports, all of which being used. I have 2 exterior hard drives, the one 750G backup library HD and a 40G hard drive that I'm using to backup my C-drive(saves space on my secondary drive).

I am undecided as to what my next move should be. I could replace both 750G hard drives with 1T but then I have 2 unused 750G hard drives. I know nothing about multiple hard drive setups and how it'll affect the playback features of my J. River. I don't want to lose the responsiveness of my playback, primarily the "radio" feature of the J. River that allows for random playback (w/ changable parameters) of my library. Using 1 interior hard drive for the whole library works great with J. River so replacing this setup with something else that will work just as good is really what I'm looking at. Being able to continue using both my 750G hard drives and add more hard drives to the library w/o losing any present playback performance would be ideal, I just don't have a clue as to how that's accomplished.

Help?

Cheers,
Robin

Robin,

Is it safe to assume that you only have room inside your PC for two drives?

What is the rate at which you are using more storage?

Will you continue to use storage at that rate in the future?

You can go with additional external storage. If you are out of USB ports, simply buy a USB hub and connect additional external storage. You can replace your internal drive with a 1.5TB drive for around $125 and move that 750GB into an external enclosure for around $30.

Before I got a new pc that can hold 4 HD's, I was using all external drives and didn't experience any performance issues. I am not using J River software, so I can't say how it will work. Why don't you try just using your current external drive and see how it performs? If it works, for under $200 your issue is solved + the cost of any additional storage for backup.

While I am sure the Empirical Audio unit is nice, $1400 for 3TB of storage is beyond expensive!! For way less than that, you can have a new PC with more than 3TB of storage.

George

Len_Dreyer · « **Reply #16 on:** 26 May 2009, 01:08 am »

Robin,

~~You could replace your internal 750GB hard drive with a 1.5TB internal hard drive. Buy an enclosure like this one and put your two 750GB drives in it and use it for backing up your new 1.5TB internal.~~

Len

Sorry I just realized that one of the 750GB drives is an external.

satfrat · « **Reply #17 on:** 26 May 2009, 01:25 am »

Yes George, it's a dual drive HTPC, I presently have 8816 albums on the 750G hard drives. I download on an average 25 albums/week. I had thought of stopging the downloading at the fill of the hard drive, then I thought about replacing both 750G HD's with a 1T Seagate. Didn't know 1.5T Seagates were available. No doubt the cheapest thing to do would simply replace the 2 hard drives but i hate to closet the two 750G so now I'm wondering about a multiple hard drive option? As it stands now George, I only trun on the exterior hard drive when I manually back up each album from my secondary drive library, once I have the tags filled and album cover loaded up.

Because I already have 2 exterior hard drives, maybe my best bet would be to replace the 40G exterior HD that I use for system backups with the interior 750G hard drive and use both 750G HD's for library backup while putting an internal 1.5T Seagate for my main library. I suppose I could also get another exterior case and continue to use the 40G HD for system backups. Hadn't considered that option as I thought Seagates only went up to 1T.

I've never changed HD's before but I read on Newegg that "OEM" listed hard drives can only be used on new motherboards. What's up with that? Seagate also has multiple hard drive options. With my prior hard drive upgrades, the builder of my HTPC, Cellar Cinemas in Hopkinton (your neck of the woods George), always did the switch along with HD selection. Unfortunately Cellar Cinemas is no more so that option is no longer available for me. I don't see a new computer in my life anytime soon unfortunately so I'll work with what I have.

Jerry, like George says, that option is both 2 expensive and doesn't address the two 750G hard drives i presently have. But it's a very nice storgae bin for sure.

Cheers,
Robin

satfrat · « **Reply #18 on:** 26 May 2009, 01:33 am »

Quote from: Len_Dreyer on 26 May 2009, 01:08 am

Robin,

~~You could replace your internal 750GB hard drive with a 1.5TB internal hard drive. Buy an enclosure like this one and put your two 750GB drives in it and use it for backing up your new 1.5TB internal.~~

Len

Sorry I just realized that one of the 750GB drives is an external.

Well Len, that's exactly what i'm thinking of doing now that I know there's a 1.5T HD available. Even tho I do already have 2 hard drive enclosures, I do have a shortage of USB ports and I'm already using a 5 USB port extention to boot so that dual HD exterior case looks pretty sweet to use for my two 750G Seagates as backup to a 1.5G Seagate secondary HD for my main library source. Just need to figure out how to accomplish all this with a limited knowledge base to work with.

But i have a plan to work with and that's too cool!

Cheers,
Robin

satfrat · « **Reply #19 on:** 26 May 2009, 01:45 am »

Would this 1.5T Seagate be what I'm looking for as a simple (

) internal hard drive switch? If so, how "simple" is "simple"... really?

Cheers,
Robin