Well, as I alluded to, knowing the reason you are trying to archive patients would be helpful in answering your other similar question. So, you can disregard my answer to that one. I think the other question is really related or even "in" this question. You can't archive patients. You can inactivate them.
As Wendell said, the patients and everything in your AC database takes up very little space. I am a rather small practice (2000 patients), but I have been using AC for nearly 15 years, and my entire AC folder is less than 8.5 GB. That is about 500 MB/year.
Indy is completely right. RAM and non-express SQL and a better processor. More space won't help unless you are down to a really low amount of space.
There used to be a time when people would say RAM is cheap and is the most inexpensive way to increase performance. While it still is, storage is now also inexpensive. If you are having issues with space and performance and the way you are trying to fix it is by finding a way to get a 15 GB database down to a 10 GB database, then I think you may be looking at it wrong.
It may be that this is the time to completely upgrade. Purchase a server and significantly increase your overall experience. At the same time, this would allow you to take advantage of today's technology which has increased by leaps and bounds. Even SSD drives are rather affordable. Drives could be so large, concern over enough space for AC would not be an issue, no matter how many patients you and your partners see.
And as Wendell says, AC has the very unique way of storing backups in the AC folder by default. These can add up quickly. There is no reason to have more than three stored at any time. Of course, you should have AC backups stored elsewhere as well. Many people run scripts as simple as one line of code in a text file, which will clean up your \\AmazingCharts\Backup\ folder from X amount of backups to two backups with one click. You can even schedule this. These backups, can be quite large, especially if they contain your imported items (which is never really a great idea in my opinion). You can always back up the II separately.
The above about backups does not necessarily apply if one is using the latest AC off-site backups. Only if you are running the backup program which auto-stores the backup in the root AC folder. I would recommend going to the above folder in the path shown to see if you are accumulating backups. They have become the infamous .enc files.
