What To Do When You Need More Space

An old joke in the computer industry holds that you can never be too rich or have too much space on your hard drive. Despite the monstrous sizes of these storage devices--measured now in gigabytes, or billions of bytes--PC owners can soon find that their new hard drive is overflowing with seldom used data. Fortunately, there are simple solutions to the storage blues.

One of the oldest remedies for hard-drive clutter is installing a tape-backup unit. These devices have become fairly standard within the computer industry, making them cheap--around $99 to $200--and available from various makers such as Seagate Technology and Colorado Memory Systems. Meanwhile, the space available on a typical tape cartridge has grown to match that of hard drives. Iomega, for example, sells a $200 unit called the Ditto 2GB that can pack 2 gigabytes of data onto a single cartridge.