I take lots of photos, so I have a second hard disk in my main computer dedicated to photos and videos. The other day I noticed that the 2 TB drive was down to only 9 GB free! That was a shock, considering that’s well less than one 32 GB card in one of my DSLRs.
Upgrade time. I had to move those 189,330 files in 2,523 folders onto a larger drive.
I have plenty of drives around that I use for backup in a couple of HD “toasters” — USB 3 docks that you can hotswap SATA drives in and out of. So I popped a 3 TB drive into a dock, and copied all those files over to it.
That done, I opened up the tower computer, pulled the old 2 TB D: drive and installed the new 3 TB drive. I used the Disk Management tools to rename the new drive to D:, so that my photo programs find it.
Worked great, and I now have nearly a TB of free space.
I have two NAS (networked attached storage) devices but use them only for backup. I like having my photos on a secondary internal HD for fast access.