If you do your art work in a project based fashion, P5's linked directories can help alleviate those bloated drives. Rather than loading everything in God's creation into your P5 runtime, just load P5. Then load items (e.g., Vicki) that you tend to use in every piece of work. When you start a project, create a Project folder and load just the items you need under it using the standard Runtime structure. Then link to it in P5 and have at it. When you're done, you can archive the whole project directory by zipping it up and/or burning it to a CD. To pull this off requires that you have all your other stuff well cataloged so you can find it easily. I keep all my stuff on CDs anyway and there are plenty of utilities that do the cataloging. (The one I use is no longer available.) Now, the advantages: 1) you don't get a bloated drive 2) you don't have to span a lot of disks to back up your Poser directory, and/or 3) you don't risk losing your entire collection of Poser items if your disk should fail 4) that archived project can be reconstituted easily if you need or want to go back and work on it some.

You don't even have to zip it if you're using Poser 5's built-in file compression, unless you want everything stored in one .zip file.