How much free space to leave on a large media HDD?

[Kestrel]

This is a topic that I have wondered about for some time, and now that one of my media drives is getting pretty full, it's time for me to take a position on it, and decide when to stop adding to the data on the drive. The problem is, there are a lot of opinions out there, and very little reasonable backing information to those opinions.

For example (we'll use "metric" HD measures instead of "real" MB/GB/TB in the following examples), I have seen it widely suggested that 10 percent minimum, but more like 20 or 25 percent of a hard drive should be left empty. I have seen as high as 50 percent suggested. My problem with these numbers is that they usually don't differentiate between system, program, and media drives, nor do they take into account the size of a drive. They may well have made a lot of sense at one point in time - for example, on a 40 MB drive, leaving 7 or 8 MB free was probably a really good idea. On a 10 GB drive, leaving at least 1 GB if not 2 free might have been a great practice too. On a 6 TB drive, used purely for media, I see absolutely no reason that 600 GB should be considered a bare minimum of free space, or that you should leave up to 1.5 TB free to consider your drive healthy. Defrags certainly don't need that kind of space!

Any opinions out there? I'm thinking something like 100 GB should be more than ample for a drive used purely for media. @SniperHF @Led Zappa - either of you guys have some thoughts?

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[Led Zappa]

@Kestrel, It comes down to Defragmentation for mechanical drives (Something we tend to forget about now that Windows handles it in the background) and performance on SSD's.

Now, you're talking about a data only drive for media, which I don't think will change much as there shouldn't be as much deleting as in other scenarios. Also, the media will only be processed at a certain rate, so you could probably push the boundaries. Processing data in a database is another matter, as an example. There you'd be looking for the fastest speeds you could get. An OS drive is another drive where you're looking for the best performance you can get and where there will be a lot of adding and deleting of files.

Here's a good article explaining the guidelines: How Much Free Space Should You Leave on Your Windows PC?

EDIT: Let me add that at work we use 20% as the threshold for alerts. Data space is relatively cheap these days and it's a happy medium. 20% gives us time to make a decision before it becomes critical.

EDIT II: I just logged into work email and there's an alert for disk space 20% for our Exchange server. I see one of these about once a month at the most, so this is quite the coincidence LOL

 

[Kestrel]

@Led Zappa thanks for that - that's an article I've actually read before while debating this question. I guess I am mostly wondering what kind of space the defrag process needs these days - since it's automated, I guess I don't have the familiarity with defrag that I would have had back in the good old DOS and early Windows days where you could leave your computer for hours at a time, waiting for that colour coded legend to gradually change to a more homogeneous looking mass. Remember this?

My reasoning was that, with no page file or anything of the sort, and the absolute largest files being just over 10 GB (with most being 2 GB or smaller) and as you mentioned, a mostly unchanging set of data, 100 GB would be plenty of working room. But, like I said, I don't have the same familiarity with the defrag process I used to - think I'm safe in that range, or should I give it more?

I guess the one thing that would change those criteria is that I was using this media drive for my Handbrake video conversions too, but with the drive sitting at 72% full, I will be moving that process over to my new, much much emptier media drive, and letting this one settle to a strictly media role.

Anyhow, thanks again - I'm just an enthusiast, you've got the industry experience, your input is definitely appreciated!

 

[Led Zappa]

@Kestrel I checked to make sure that article was fairly recent, so I'd say the info is up date. I trust most of what I get from that site.

Oh lord do I remember that image. The first thing I used to do when people complained about performance was to make space and clean up their drive, sooo... many drives.

Like I said, this mostly comes down to a performance issue, especially for SSD's. If it's a data drive and if your only using it for media I would think you could push the boundaries quite a bit if it's a mechanical drive. At worst you corrupt a movie. You're not risking your OS crashing and not being able to recover. And since I know you back up like a good person should, you should have no worries

 

[Kestrel]

@Kestrel I checked to make sure that article was fairly recent, so I'd say the info is up date. I trust most of what I get from that site.

Oh lord do I remember that image. The first thing I used to do when people complained about performance was to make space and clean up their drive, sooo... many drives.

Like I said, this mostly comes down to a performance issue, especially for SSD's. If it's a data drive and if your only using it for media I would think you could push the boundaries quite a bit if it's a mechanical drive. At worst you corrupt a movie. You're not risking your OS crashing and not being able to recover. And since I know you back up like a good person should, you should have no worries

Thanks for the input! I don't... back up quite as much as I should. There might be a good 50 GB or so floating around not backed up The music though - most of the music exists in at least 3, or 4, or sometimes 5 physical drives, between 3 different computers. The movies and TV series I'm not quite as worried about, if I lose one or two series, or a handful of movies, that's easy enough to fix. Now that I'm getting serious, and moving up to double digit TB storage though, I think I'm going to look into freeware that will automate the process for me.