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    Hard Drive Question...

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by troyman21, Apr 9, 2008.

  1. troyman21

    troyman21 Notebook Consultant

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    I was just curious about a HDD. I have a 160GB 5400RPM SATA HDD, and I was just curious, would the computer start performing a little slower if a certain amount of the hard drive gigabytes are left/taken up?
     
    troyman21, Apr 9, 2008
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  2. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

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    Not, really.
    If you have say 20 programs taking up 30 Gb of space, and you have 130gb of pictures, it will start up the same speed as if the harddrive only had 30Gb of programs, and 1Gb of pictures.

    If you have 2000programs, which use 140Gb of space, it will take forever for the system to start, because every program has associated processes, which run in the background.

    If you just add more pictures and files, you will not slow the harddrive down.
    The addition of software programs slows down the harddrive.

    K-TRON
     
    K-TRON, Apr 9, 2008
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  3. usapatriot

    usapatriot Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Usually if you have less than four gigabytes (or so) of free space left you could run into some trouble running certain programs that use the page/swap file or cache stuff on the hard drive. The problem is probably more common in games or applications like photoshop or video editing programs.

    At least that is what I have noticed with my system.
     
    usapatriot, Apr 9, 2008
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  4. troyman21

    troyman21 Notebook Consultant

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    I could only imagine myslef going as low as 60GB-50GB with the hard drive I mentioned, if lower, barely much lower. How's that than?
     
    troyman21, Apr 9, 2008
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  5. usapatriot

    usapatriot Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    There is no problem using up most of the space, just leave a couple gigs or maybe a bit more like four gigs (buffer room) free at all times.

    However, if you want to successfully defragment your hard drive for maximum performance you must leave at least 15% free which on your hard drive means about 23gb free.

    Recommended disk defragger:

    Auslogics Disk Defrag
     
    usapatriot, Apr 9, 2008
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  6. troyman21

    troyman21 Notebook Consultant

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    Chances that I'll go as low as 23GB are highly unlikely, I even find as low as 40GB hard to imagine... so I think I may be MORE than good to go. Thanks...
     
    troyman21, Apr 9, 2008
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