December 30, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
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I’m still limping along on my old Toshiba settlement laptop. It’s just about four or five years old now but it’s still administration well for me and my daily use. The only problem I have is a small hard drive. With the SQL work I do, that hard drive breathing space gets sucked up quick!
sql-data-files
I used to let SQL Server put my data files in their non-attendance locations and just run with it, but it became annoying digging through all those directory levels to come across the files I wanted sometimes.
Then I strong-willed to set my default location to a separate SQLDATA directory within my hard drive root location so they were straightforward to get to quickly. The challenge there is I started to run out of room on my hard drive due to a combine of large databases.
These huge databases aren’t ones I was using on a regular basis and really just had them installed for constant support questions or potential future development. I started taking the databases offline but that still left the huge files on my main drive.
For those databases that I use on a far less everyday basis, I setup their database files to be used from an exterior USB drive. Doing this freed up almost 30GB of available hard drive space (half the size of my drive). I still the databases offline pending I need them and just have to plug-in the external drive sooner than I bring them back online.
Everything is working great!
