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Should leave 10% free on your hard drive - true?
Bill Clinton
Posts: 9,389 Forum Member
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Was given advice to leave about 10% free on any hard drive as the file system degrades in performance with file transfers/write speed etc and can lead to more chances of corrupting the file system on the drive. I was more annoyed by the advice because I thought about how many people would be caught out by it because it effectively means that 10% of your space is now useless! And they don't warn you so people like me will just fill it to the brim and risk it in huge numbers, just as I did with a 3TB drive recently which I now have lost, most was elsewhere too but not quite everything. Unless you are doing a one off copy of something that fills the drive which you could risk. We already lose quite a bit of hard drive to the overhead on the file system, eg a 1 TB drive formatted as FAT32 displays as 931 GB capacity in Windows. So now what would we have, 810 GB? Not bad, but not quite what we thought we were paying for.
So I'll probably have to follow this because once the idea is in your head, but why don't they warn people and how big a risk is this anyway? I've not had too many problems and not sure if the 3 TB which I'd completely filled was actually damaged by a knock.
So I'll probably have to follow this because once the idea is in your head, but why don't they warn people and how big a risk is this anyway? I've not had too many problems and not sure if the 3 TB which I'd completely filled was actually damaged by a knock.
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The analogy I always think of is that a hard drive is like a book case filling up with books. With different files taking up space as books do. And even different parts of the same file taking up space in different places.
Whenever you save something, the book case is reorganised as efficiently as possible. So if there is plenty of space on the book case, its fairly easy to move stuff around.
But if the book case is virtually full, then it becomes increasingly difficult to do that, and the whole thing becomes less and less efficient.
I don't think it renders 10% useless - it just means you'll probably start to notice a real slow down on your computer when opening and saving files when the hard drive is nearly full.
Have you read The Instructions for these complex pieces of technology you wish to use?
There are warnings aplenty.
I'll grant that the full Instructions are rather large, so many choose popular shortforms.
Perhaps the main criticism is that manufacturers promote these things as suitable for anyone, and able to transform your life for the better, without any training.
You do need about 20% free on a Hard Drive for various reasons.
A lot of processes require temporary space on the drive. e.g. burning a Blu-ray disc anything up to maybe 50 GB.
Even something as mundane as a printer maybe requires 1 GB.
Defragmenting a drive also needs a lot of temporary space, 20% free is usually quoted for that.
So when you are down to less than about 20% things start to slow up, the space is not lost it's made use of all be it temporarily by Windows and Applications.
If you want 1 TB of space you buy a 2 TB drive, don't see why that's a 'problem'.
Disk drive manufacturers use the approved definitions of M/G/T prefixes based on multiples of 1000. Microsoft however use definitions based on multiples of 1024 which means they should be using the Mi/Gi/Ti designations for the units.
1TB as defined by the drive maker is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
1,000,000,000,000 bytes using the 1024 multiple equates to 931.32 GB in Microsoft speak or 931GiB as it should be shown.
Not true - you don't lose anything. This is to do with the different number base systems. Manufacturers use base 10 to describe the capacity of a HDD eg 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas computers use base 2 eg 1GB = 1024MB etc. It's a marketing ploy to make their devices appear bigger, so 1.5TB in the shop is 1.36TB when installed on your computer. Nothing to do with overheads or file systems.
In a similar fashion a 4.7GB DVD will only hold about 4.38GB of data.
edit - you beat me to it.
It's more to do with Microsoft.
I'm using a Macbook at the moment and that is quite happy to use base 10 when giving file or disk sizes. For example according to the Disk Utility
Used Space: 63.13 GB (63,131,435,008 Bytes)
but under Windows it would be
Used Space: 58.8GB (63,131,435,008 Bytes)
Most IT people are used to the 2^X as an indication of storage as its what we're used to, the actual number of zeros and ones remains the same as its a bit like a metric versus imperial debate in that both describe the same thing but they use different numbers to do it.
Not near a mac at the moment but i wonder what if you opened a terminal session up and did a df would it by default show a 10^ or a 2^ result?
Just tried df on my Macbook.
It listed everything in bytes.
http://s11.postimg.org/6lg57tvgj/filesize.jpg
I guess a 29.76GB iPad don't sound as sexy as a 32GB device. I also guess that finding this interesting shows what a geek I am . . .
Ah well you see that's because Apple use the correct unit prefixes. If Microsoft could actually use the Mi and Gi prefixes there wouldn't be this confusion as it indicates they are not the same as M or G and based on a different numbering system.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
However an alternative version of the apochryphal Moore's Law seems to apply i.e. ability to fill a disk capacity doubles every year. On this basis, if you only have 10% available, it will not last long before you need to upgrade anyway.
As a historical note - my first hard disk (mid 70s) had a huge capacity of 20 MB! Compared with 5.25 inch floppy disks (160 kb), this seemed awesome at the time - equivalent to 128 floppy disks (back in days when 1 MB really meant 1024 KB etc).
Over 30 years, this means the actual average increase in capacity has been 43.5% per annum approximately. So if you could get that 43.5% as compound interest on cash, and had invested £20, it would now be worth over million pounds!
He set up the Department, within the Maths Department, in our school and we started with 2 x RM-380Z machines, one of which had an 8" Floppy drive and the other a cassette player.
I think he said they were £3,000 each.
Gallery
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Think you're a decade out
Yeah I meant 80s