Will it safe to keep HD on red indicator? Myths or Real?

Okey now my laptop have only 12Gb Free space out of 320Gb.

It is on red indicator when you open up my computer under the C drive.

My question is:
Will it safe to keep my hard drive under red indicator?
or
Better for me to transfer my files to external HD so it will be back to blue indicator.


I heard that if I keep my HD under red indicator, it will have higher chance for me to crash my system. It is true?

People also said that the computer will operate slower under those circumstance. It is true ?

Also,
Is Seagate 500GB 7200RPM HD is a good choice of upgrade?

Please enlight me.

 

I would never push my drive to less than 15% free space. Hard to recover from errors when something happens that need defragging and chkdsk.

cheers ...

 

In order for your computer to run in top shape, you should defragment your hard drive once in awhile. That is impossible with less than 15% left.

Delete some stuff you don't really need.

Use CCleaner to get some crap off of your hd, like temp files etc that you don't need anyway. It got 3GBs off my desktop when I first used it.

 

With the HDD constantly active it will start to get hot and the constant movement of the actuator arms will cause unnecessary wear and tear to the HDD, so it is more likely to fail.

 

Thanks for the info guys..
Any more input?

 

An almost full hard drive would also make the computer slower. So you should never really fill up the hard drive.

 

The computer will run a bit slower with a nearly full hard drive, as new files (and ones recently modified) will be fragmented due to the low amount of free space, and thus the hard drive actuator will have to move more to read the data. And you also have to use the slowest part of the drive when it's almost full. So yes, it is a bit slower and does cause a bit more wear.

But, having run my computer with less than 1 GB (of 149) free for several weeks last fall, I couldn't anecdotally tell any difference. Maybe because most of the files I was reading weren't being modified and were just as quick to read as always, maybe because it just still wasn't that slow. You certainly won't be sitting around for several minutes waiting for things to load. If you don't need to use the remaining 12 GB anytime soon, I wouldn't rush out to buy a larger hard drive - obviously, if you are planning to use that space, it would make sense to buy one.

As for crashing, the only problems I had were with hibernation when I had very little hard drive space free. Even then, 1 GB was always sufficient - it was mostly when I had about 100 MB that hibernation was very sketchy. If you don't use hibernation or virtual memory, though, you should be okay with significantly less than 1 GB of free space and still not have crashes.

The 7200.4 from Seagate had some significant issues when it was first released that led to an abnormally high failure rate, but it seems to have been fixed now. I'd still be cautious lest you receive an old version that has the hardware issues leading to higher failure rates. One of the 5400 RPM 500 GB drives may be safer, as none of those are known to have very high failure rates.

Windows' built-in Disk Cleanup utility can probably save you some space for now, too. Just run cleanmgr from the Run window (Vista's search should find it for you, too, if you don't have Run on), and choose several options such as temporary files, setup files, etc. Compression probably will save the most space, and is a bit of a mixed bag. It means using more CPU cycles to decode the data on the hard drive, but also means spending less time reading the actual disk. With slower CPU's it used to be recommended to avoid disk compression, but nowadays it might actually be faster to spend the CPU time decompressing the data, saving the disk read time. I wasn't able to notice a considerable slowdown with it on; if you need the space it may be worth turning on.