Learn How To Add An External Drive To Your PC

“Expanding your PC’s storage with an external hard drive is quick and easy, and can make a real difference to the way you work”

- Ian Evenden

External storage is pretty cheap at the moment, so if your PC’s internal hard drive – or SSD – is groaning at the seams with accumulated documents, photos and video files, why not offload it to an external drive?

While emptying your internal drive on its own won’t speed up your computer, it can have many knock-on effects that make it appear like it has – things like file indexing taking less time, which frees up your processor for other tasks, or virus scanning being completed more quickly.

Once, there were many ways you could attach a new drive to your PC, but these days the USB socket is king – the blue USB 3.0 sockets being noticeably faster than their USB 2.0 predecessors. If you have a new, powerful laptop, you may have smaller USB-C ports, but these aren’t found on PCs very often yet, and adapters are easily available.

Step-by-step Expand your computer’s storage

1 Plug it in