Full Hdd = Less Performance?

hi all i have all ways only had a few games installed on my hard drive,If i installed more say to half the capacity or more.
-will it impact gaming performance
-loading times
I defrag everyday

 

depends... if you have a 160gb and a 250gb hard drive of the same brand and model series... the 250gb will be faster (if defraged properly) because the head on the disk will not have to move as far to get the data it needs.

 

splash,
if you are installing a lot or programs, the speed of the drive will perform slightly slower because when a program is installed it usually runs somewhere in the background.
I have done tests on my system, with the same amount or programs, and 20 gb of space used, and 140gb of space used, and the speed is the same.
The amount of files you have doesnt slow down the harddrive, as long as you defrag it.
Its the programs which slow the drive down.

K-TRON

 

And no gaming performance (fps) will not be lower, but it can take longer to load levels with a full HD.

 

Personally, my general performance is greatly diminished if I'm using more than 90% of the disk.

 

Usually your performance will be somewhat slower when accessing the HD that is more than 75% full because the way Windows writes files onto your drive (and it's always doing so if you have Vista) is that say you have a doc file that's 1MB large, but you ended up making it 10MB large, well if you went into your HD and you find out that the original location of your file no longer has 10MB available, Windows has to find another place for your file and that slows down performance. Except instead of a doc file, you have hundreds of stupid window files that it writes in teh background without you knowing.

at least this is my understanding

 

50% shouldn't make a difference. Below 15%, and it gets difficult (and eventually impossible) to defrag. Once you get really low (1% or so) you may notice it becoming a bit slower, but even at 0.1%, it'll still be decently close to the speed it usually it. I've run at 0.1% for probably about 3 weeks cumulatively; if it had caused a noticeable slowdown I would've gone to the effort of freeing up more space.

Now when you get to around 0.01% it may start freezing when you try to hibernate. But even if it hits zero, it won't actually crash (XP at least). Unless possibly if you're out of RAM, too - then you're asking for trouble.

 

I agree with everything you just said as i've tested the same thing as you and came to the same conclusion as you.

 

I have no idea, why a full HDD will perform slower. Yeah, it'll be hard to defrag past the 15% mark, but there is nothing else that accounts for slower performance other than fragmentation.

 

depends on where on the HDD the data in question is.

if at the beginning then it's fast, if towards the end then it will be 2 times slower read speeds. Look at any HD Tune graph out there .. same thing.

This is because of the disk running with constant speed. At the beginning, or at the edge of the disk, the speed of the area under the heads will be greatest. When you start moving towards the end of the disk, or towards the center, the speed of the area under the heads will decrease, thus decreasing HDD performance as a whole.

that's why with HDDs you install everything important first

 

I think the key factor is disk fragmentation; it will not only increase program load times but also runtime performance if the page file is heavily used.

Yes, Track 0 is the outermost track of a hard disk, and data transfer rates at the edge are higher than in the center ( A slightly older reference with some numerical data, I don’t think much has changed).

 

Yeah, I got the point that the data in the inner tracks will have poor transfer rates and access times.

But that's not going to make the HDD all that slow. And this is necessarily not caused due to a full HDD. Improper partitioning will also lead to the same.

A full HDD is not going to have a very huge performance dip. Whatever (small) dip there will be, is gonna be because of file fragmentation. I think some defraggers still defrag files properly regardless of the <15% space warning.

If the data is read/written on the outermost tracks, performance will be good, regardless of the fact whether the HDD is full or not and the same is going to apply to the data read/written on each track. Performance will be literally the same. Data is still gonna be packed together (closely), and is found through indexes & file allocation tables, etc.

 

I think it has to also deal with the filesystem used on the hard drive. NTFS (used on all new Windows computers) becomes less efficient as the hard drive has less free space (like less than 15% free).

 

With diminishing free space, there is a higher likelyhood* of files ending up in the 'inner areas' of the platter closer to the spindle, so that's bound to increase I/O times for those files. Lower disk space also means that files are likely to fragment more if the contiguous free space is limited. 15% free space requirement is mainly for the Windows defragger, I know that Diskeeper Professional can defrag with less than 10% even, it has worked perfectly on a couple of drives that were hitting 8% free space (non-OS drives, XP).

* I say 'likelyhood' because there is no way to precisely specify the actual physical location of a file on the platter(s). Physical file placement is done by the drive's hardware on-board controller and not by Windows. One can only guess/hope that files are filled in from outer tracks to inner tracks linearly.