I’m still limping along on my old Toshiba Satellite laptop. It’s pushing four or five years old now but it’s still running 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 space gets sucked up quick!
I used to let SQL Server put my data files in their default locations and just run with it, but it became annoying digging through all those directory levels to find the files I wanted sometimes.
Then I decided to set my default location to a separate SQLDATA directory within my hard drive root location so they were easy to get to quickly. The challenge there is I started to run out of room on my hard drive due to a couple of large databases.
These large databases aren’t ones I was using on a regular basis and really just had them installed for ongoing support questions or potential future development. I started taking the databases offline but that still left the large files on my main drive.
For those databases that I use on a far less frequent basis, I setup their database files to be used from an external USB drive. Doing this freed up almost 30GB of available hard drive space (half the size of my drive). I still the databases offline until I need them and just have to plug-in the external drive before I bring them back online.
Everything is working great!