How full do you let your HDD get?

Just wondering what % free you guys try to keep your local disk (or overall space) at.

Is there any downside to filling up 80-90%? I am currently trying to stay above the 50% ratio, but perhaps this is unnecessary?

Any performance gain in keeping so much empty space? Or should I fill it up?

 

i sometimes let the file go to 1% or less in fact around 100mb left out of 160gb hdd. but the performance slow down a lot and getting low on HDD space notification and low on virtual memmory.

filling up to 25% reduces file system fragmentation management more than necessary.

below 15% windows cannot defragment your partition with windows built in tool. but other better program can, but it will take ages.

yes, the file fragment less.


i usually try to keep my hdd at least 25% free on windows. and 35% free on mac.

 

I'm cool just as long as my torrent program can continue the night without freezing my computer.

The lowest I've seen on my computer is zero bytes free (plus random error messages -> delayed write etc). The lowest I would comfortably leave my computer is say 500MB.

Right now: 28.5 GB of 149 GB free = 19% free.

 

I left a recording run overnight at work, the next day the computer was very sluggish and errors kept popping up.

I leave about 30%

 

I never end up using more than 50% unless I'm running 2 or 3 operating systems.

 

On my laptop, I've not been able to fill my 500GB drive beyond 30-40% because it's mainly work related stuff with a few music and video files thrown in for entertainment.

My desktop is another story. I've retired a couple of 160-250GB drives that were 90% full. They work fine.

Currently, one of my 250GB drives is about 93% full (it hit 96% at one time ) and the rest (mix of 500 and 640GB HDDs) are 60-80% full. All work fine. Defragging is also not a problem because I use Diskeeper 2009 Pro and it defrags even with less than 7% free space if you leave it in auto defrag mode.
Never failed me so far.

Mind you, these drives that get filled up to the 90% level are *not* OS drives...those I havent filled up beyond 60%.

 

That's my current state.

I have gone to the point where I had a combined 5 GB left. Then I started deleting movies and large files and removed programs to make space. I try to keep 10% or more.

 

Mine is usually like 50GB Free I get lots of Movies and T.V. Shows and stuff like that.

 

On my old Dell, I once reached 200 mbs of free space left on a 80 gb.

 

ah also if you own SSD drive you want it as free as possible, so that the SSD doesnt need to write on so little spot over and over and over again, leading to premature failure. on these drive you want around 50% to be comfortable. of course it depends on the usage and the size of you SSD.

have i mention that having large HDD with little in it increase performance and reduce fragmentation development.

 

Is it true that more files in hdd less the speed of system?

 

I used up about 60% on my desktop's HDD and it's still kicking great although it's not as perfect nor smooth like it used to be (20.9GB of 60GB remaining so far).

 

I've got about 20% free on my laptop right now. I recently purchase a new DSLR camera, and that took up a lot of space. Thankfully, I got an external TB, and I'm getting a new laptop with a more srs bsns set of 320 GB HDDs. I look forward to the end of the space struggle.

 

I have 1 percent free space on my 500gig, 250gig hdds. They're all filled with HDV camcorder footage from a drama performance and some small chunks of data here and there.

Filling up the HDD properly won't make your computer slow. Filling hdd up improperly plus framentation will lag your computer. It's a physical limitation of the hdd. The outer area have faster data throughtput thus if majority of data is on the outer layer, your computer will be faster. If majority of your data are on the inner tracks and very framented, you computer will slow down to a crawl, slower than a snail.

 

I usually try to get around 40%-50% of my HDD free. Anytime I start getting lower I put things like music or videos on my external.

 

My old custom desktop that I use now to download goes constantly from 90% Free to 1% free and it still runs fine. It only has an 80G so I can drain it fast when i torrent.

 

The 160gb hdd in my dell has about 10-15gb free. Next time I will go bigger.