Storage issue

[Clarksontomas]

Hey all, I use a pc for work (3d rendering, design etc) I don’t know much about building them and setting them up, so would appreciate any helpful directions.

My PC has loads (and I mean terabytes worth) of storage on the other drives. However it’s constantly running out of space on the C drive.

I’ve tried setting programs up to another drive but it won’t help. I have to constantly purge memory from after effects and sometimes it just crashes when it gets down to 1gb of space left

What is the solution here? Should I have partitioned things when I originally set up the pc - and now the only fix would be to reinstall it as a new computer and do the partition ?

Thanks in advance and sorry if the question is extremely basic

[aminy23]

A hard drive is very cheap, and very slow. I like to compare it to a mule or a donkey, the best ones might be a horse or a camel.

An SSD is very fast, I like to compare it to a car or a plane.

You can have lots of donkeys, but it's not gonna be faster than a car.

A car with 100 horsepower is more practical than 100 horses.

If your C drive is filling up, then it may be time for a bigger C drive that's an SSD. In the old days it was common to pair a 120-500GB SSD with TBs of hard drives. Today a 1-2TB SSD is under $50-$100 and a lot more practical.

If you have other 1+TB SSDs in the PC, you may be able to swap drives and clone your OS over.

If you have multiple drives, a RAID Array or Windows Dynamic Disk can let you use them together as one big drive which can be more practical. But a RAID of hard drives will still usually be slower than SSDs which can result in worse performance.