The first suggest is to not be satisfied with just one hard drive, but to install on your system a second hard drive. This will improve the performance of your system, let you backup one hard drive to the other, and give you many more options for organizing your hard drives than a single drive will offer you.
Adding a second hard drive to your system is fairly inexpensive today. If you watch the prices a bit, you can find a 30-40 GB hard drive for $99. And adding a second hard drive is fairly easy to do or you can pay your retailer a few dollars to do it for you.
To know which hard drives are the best and which models to avoid, I would suggest you check out the web site of www.driveservice.com. They offer their opinions of good and bad hard drives.
In the rest of this presentation, I will assume that you have taken this first step of adding a second hard drive, although you can really do most of the following suggestions on a single hard drive system as well. I’ll show you an example of a single drive system later in this presentation.