I am looking for a replacement desktop for wifey. She saves tons of pics & videos (she's the family photographer), and she is maxing out a Tb on her documents partition as it is. Most computer makers on their sites, only offer up to 2 tb hard drives; I was hoping to get 4. I'm wondering--would it be wise to simply get an external drive, and not use it as backups (like I do the external drive that I already have), but keep it plugged in to the desktop 24/7? I am thinking of using the external drive as the documents partition, and then the SSD that the desktop comes with, would be the OS drive. Would that end up shortening its life at all (as in, constantly having read/write cycles onto the external drive)?