I've a 1 TB harddrive, when formatted as NTFS (931 GB). I was simply wondering how much on this drive must be free before the harddrive starts getting slower.No, actually, I know what RAM is. That is not the question. I've heard, that if you overfill an harddrive without a buffert, it would in the end become slower in situations for instance like in a playback of a movie file.
How much space must be available before the harddrive becomes slow?
- Thread starter DamonA
- Start date
The hard drive space doesn't really affect speed. You're thinking of the RAM (recently accessed memory). You could have the biggest hard drive in the world and it wouldn't speed anythign up if you didn't have enough RAM. So you can fill that thing up and it won't affect speed. But you may think about putting in some big ol' RAM sticks into your computer so that the computer can process more. Oh yeah, proccessors. Those are a big thing to if you want a fast computer.
justinjedi
New member
i believe a lot of the slowness with harddrives is due to the way that the data is stored. if the data is segmented ie parts of the data is stored on different parts of the hd then the head of the hd needs to go back and forth to retrieve all the data.
ishootbirds2
New member
from what I've experienced, I've always found a massive speed drop when the drive is over 50% full. This is for the primary hard drive only. other hard drives I notice no speed loss. A drive over 50% full makes windows spend too much time looking for stuff. Even when the drive has been defragged the problem doesn't go away. This happened on my Windows 98 PC (5.5 GB HDD) my Windows XP PC (74 GB HDD) and my Windows MCE Laptop (96 GB HDD). My current desktop is the first to have two hard drives, the secondary is over 90% full while the primary HDD where windows is stored is barely 25% full (of 1.3 GB total capacity). With or without the very much full second hard drive windows performs the same, so how full the other drives are doesn't contribute to slow performance.Additional tests I did to confirm the 50% theory is:I've transferred the XP hard drive to my current PC and booted, using a removable drive I experimented to see if there's a performance drop when the hard drive is: 15% full, 45%, 55%, and 80% full. My current PC is extremely powerful, so hardware causing performance drops is ruled out as a factor. There's a significant difference in speed when the drive is under 45% full and over 45% full. Restoring the original stuff, it comes up to about 50% full and the performance is pretty much in between fast and slow. RAM is a factor though. I'm gonna assume you have a fairly new drive using the SATA2/3 interface, because there's not many EIDE drives that holds a terabyte. SATA is very fast, it has loads of bandwidth, but the drive physically can't actually use all that bandwidth. Hard drives (non-SSD) hangs around 180 MB/s max speed, which is much slower than most computer RAM. with extremely large files (movies and whatever) your system may run out of physical RAM and dump whatever doesn't fit into the virtual RAM, called the paging file on the hard drive. when this happens regardless of how full or empty your HDD is performance will drop alot, it may appear the PC has froze. make sure you have enough space on the HDD for at least 2X your physical installed RAM. By default windows will reserve 1X your RAM for the paging file. sometimes on older computers this paging file may expand when needed to 2X the physical ram size. If your drive is too full and there isn't enough space for that you'll suffer badly in performance.