Kestrel
Registered User
- Jan 30, 2005
- 5,814
- 129
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?
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?