One of the consequences of my photography obsession was that I spent much of 2024 scrambling to try and make sure I had enough space for all those new photos. A few months ago, I took my laptop apart to more than double the space available.

In reality, it wasn’t too hard, but given I’ve always said “It’s not an accident that I’m a software person, not a hardware person”, I was proud of myself for (finally!) getting it done.

TL;DR

I replaced a 1 TB SSD with a 4 TB SSD, and that more than doubled my total space available, from ~1.9 TB to ~4.6 TB. As a result, I’m free to continue to take photos without worrying too much about where they’ll fit.

A couple of previous attempts to get more space

A decade or so ago, I got a laptop shortly before I travelled to the US. At that point, I wasn’t doing it because I was running out of space, but I wanted to make sure it could handle future needs. Since the main drive was only 256 GB (probably still quite big in 2014…), I had a 1 TB second drive put in. There! Surely I wouldn’t run out of space ever?

Fast forward to 2022, and I was planning to return to the US and also visit Canada. The laptop I got in 2014 was still my main computer, but it wasn’t about to travel anywhere. Not only was it increasingly slow, but both the screen and the battery were dead. It could do the job while sitting on my desk, but not on the other side of the world.

I was also starting to run out of space, and that was a problem. Most laptop manufacturers seemed hesitant to even provide one 1 TB drive, which was less than I already had. However, I found one laptop model which had an optional second 1 TB drive, seemed to have the other things I was looking for, and wasn’t too expensive. That nearly doubled my addressable disk space. Surely it would last a while?

Photography took over

What I wasn’t expecting was how much photography would take over my life. Maybe individual photos don’t take up that much space, but I ended up taking photos pretty nearly every day and capturing over 100,000 a year. Sure, I wasn’t expecting to keep all those photos, but it still adds up pretty quickly.

Here are some raw numbers:

Before I got this laptop, I had 523 GB of photos over 14.5 years of digital photography. They weren’t the only things I was storing, either, so with maybe 1.1 TB available it wasn’t surprising that I was starting to run out (don’t forget that a 1 TB drive doesn’t fit 1,000 GB).

That makes for an average of 36 GB / year. The new laptop had around 1.9 TB. If I’d kept that average up, the extra storage space would have bought me an extra 20 years (longer than the laptop was likely to last).

In practice, though, I was taking more photos every year. I had 80 GB of photos from 2019. For 2021, the number was 126 GB. Still, even that rate would have bought me another 10 years.

However…

In the six months after getting the laptop, I added 350 GB of photos. All up, I’d taken nearly 100,000 photos in 2022.

I said to myself that a lot of that was because I was on holiday. Travelling. Taking lots of photos while having less spare time to sort them out. Soon it would get back to normal.

Then in 2023 I took nearly took 120,000 photos without leaving Australia (I didn’t even leave Victoria till December…). In 2024 I ventured into Central Australia and NSW, took lots of photos in Victoria, and in all ended up with just over 120,000 photos.

Even after photo sorting, duplicate removal, etc., this all takes space. A lot of space.

I said the first six months of my new laptop added 350 GB of photos. Well, the rest of 2023 has 358 GB, 2024 has 389 GB, and by the time I finally got to switching drives in March, I had 48GB from 2025 (it’s now 149 GB). If I spent more time on it I could probably reduce the space taken by 2022, 2023, and 2024 - but the space needed for 2025 will continue to grow.

So there’s the problem: While my first 14.5 years of photography took 523 GB, I’d added a further 1.145 TB in less than 3 years. Given I only had about 1.9TB total available, I knew something needed to be done.

Continual juggling required

It first became pressing in June 2024. I was visiting Alice Springs and walking the Larapinta Track. I had about 100 GB free. Surely I wouldn’t fill up my 64 GB camera card in a couple of weeks? (spoiler: I did)

At the time it was OK. I found some large files I didn’t need. I did some juggling. I sorted through some of the Alice Springs photos. Things fit - just.

But the photos continued to pile up. It got to October. Spring had come, so I was taking thousands of photos of flowers and birds. I knew I needed to do something - but I was getting ready to go to Sydney, and couldn’t spare the time.

As it turned out, I took around 7,500 photos in Sydney. That was more than the spare space I had available, so there’s no way they were all fitting. I had to load the photos in a day at a time, and make sure I’d filtered out that day’s photos before moving on to the next day.

As the year hurtled towards its end, the measures grew more desperate. I started moving a few rarely used files onto backup only. Then more of them. I got rid of more unused files. Restarting my computer more frequently would shrink the swap file and give me some extra space.

And so I got to the end of the year. I had a Christmas break - that would give me a chance to clean up existing photos, right? (spoiler: In practice, I went walking a lot, took a lot of new photos, didn’t have time to sort through existing photos, and actually took a lot more space).

The reality still was that I was running out of runway, and I knew I was running out of runway, but I was avoiding doing anything about it.

The solution

The obvious solution was to replace my second drive with a larger one. And ideally larger meant a lot larger. Going to, say, a 2 TB drive would have meant 3 TB in total - only a 50% increase, and probably wouldn’t last more than a year or two.

Since we computer people love our binaries, the logical next step up from a 2 TB drive is a 4 TB drive. That would mean a total of around 4.6 TB - more than double what I previously had (actually, fun fact: Even after I’ve moved more of my files to the new drive, I’ve still got more free space on it now than I had total space available on the two existing drives).

Despite my “I’m a software person, not a hardware person”, this wouldn’t be the first time I opened up a laptop. Back in Uni, when my laptop was slowing down, I upgraded the RAM from 256 MB to 512 MB (yes, that might give some idea of how long ago it was…). But I don’t think I was as nervous about it back then as I felt this time round.

What did I need?

  • I needed a screwdriver of the right type (none of this Phillips head business).
  • I needed to make sure I had the right type of replacement drive.

Really, that’s about it.

Replacing the drive had been the plan since at least October, maybe earlier. I got the screwdriver in October. I finally got the drive in February. But it got to March and I still hadn’t installed it.

Then came a holiday long weekend, and I said to myself “If you’re not going to do it now, when will you do it?” I also knew that the thirty day return window for the new drive had nearly closed, so could tell myself “You’re going to be annoyed with yourself if you got the wrong one and can’t even return it”.

The process

I expected the process to be fairly simple:

  1. Make sure my backups were completely up to date.
  2. Open up the back of the laptop.
  3. Pick one of the two identical drives to replace (I couldn’t figure out which one was the one I wanted).
  4. Check if I picked right. If I didn’t (and, in fact, I didn’t) - repeat.
  5. Make sure the computer started up correctly.
  6. Screw it all back together.
  7. Copy all the files from backups to the brand new drive.

Easy, right?

My laptop was out of warranty, so opening it up wouldn’t void the warranty - but I was worried that I might end up bricking it. I did have careful backups, so I’m sure I could have worked it out, but it would have been inconvenient. After all, pretty much my whole life is on this computer.

That was one reason for putting it off in February - I had to make sure I’d completed my February post before I risked my laptop.

After all the worry and all the procrastination, what was the biggest problem I faced? Using the wrong screwdriver size.

Somehow, despite finding things online saying my laptop used T6 screws, I had convinced myself that the T5 was the one I should be using. And (surprise, surprise!) that didn’t work at all. Turns out it’s much easier unscrewing when using the right screw size…

The lifecycle of a chore

In the final analysis, adding extra space wasn’t that hard, and that was kind of what I was expecting. But I agonised over every step, and procrastinated over every step. And in the process, I caused myself a lot of trouble while trying to avoid doing the task I knew I needed to do.

I find it common for chores to be like this, really. This one was higher stakes than most, because mistakes could have been expensive (in both time and money). But what I find is when I procrastinate on a task, the mental hurdle grows bigger and bigger, till it’s nearly insurmountable.

Get past this and actually do the task, and it’s often not that hard. Plus it’s satisfying - not just having got it out of the way, but feeling that I’ve achieved something.

It’s so much nicer!

The main thing is not having to worry about it. I’ve been able to go back to taking lots of pictures on a weekend without having to worry about whether they’re going to fit. It’s not that the worry stopped me taking pictures - but it did affect me. I also don’t have to sort through my photos as promptly, which isn’t necessarily a good thing - though I still try to get to them.

It also means I’ve got space to back up recent files between those two discs like I used to, which could be handy if anything goes wrong.

Clearing the way for further changes

My much-loved (and much-used!) camera is slowly falling apart. I’ve thought that one day maybe I’ll replace it with some kind of DSLR, and perhaps get more into photo editing. I’m still not sure I actually want to do that (a compact camera is really convenient, and I already don’t have enough time to sort through the photos I do take without trying to edit them further). But it definitely wasn’t something I was going to do while I was constantly running out of space.

Now I can procrastinate (cough defer the decision) for a different reason 😉.

One final procrastination

I wrote the first draft of this post days after I replaced the drive. That was more than three months ago, and I’ve come back to it numerous times without quite finishing it. Now that’s done too.

Looking forward again

It’s exactly halfway through the year, and I’ve taken exactly 52,000 photos so far. I look forward to what I’ll be able to discover and experience (and hopefully share) in the rest of the year - without worrying about space.