What percent of disc space should be left free?

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by d4nnyboy, Apr 25, 2009.

  1. d4nnyboy

    d4nnyboy Member

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    Hi all :)

    Iv read that 20-25% of disk space should be left free...

    My questions are.....Would 20% be a reasonable amount and how can I configure a setting to automatically keep that "X" amount of GB's from being used...

    I keep telling my brother not to overfill the hard drive with his crap or it wont opperate properly...

    If it was his PC I would leave him to it but he shares it with my mum.
    If I can set it to keep that "X" amount to be kept by default then problem solved.

    Any advice will be apprieciated
     
  2. mrcapdown

    mrcapdown Regular member

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    Hi,

    I am not sure where you got your information from but that is not true, the only reason that you would need free space on the drive would be for a defragmentation which i think is 15%.

    Thanks
    Dave
     
  3. d4nnyboy

    d4nnyboy Member

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    I read it here:

    http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service...447626+1240740569184+28353475&threadId=143855

    Second post down,

    I found a couple of other places that say similar things, basically they all say roughly that if you max out an ntfs hard drive the operating system runs really poor...

    My bro filled a 160GB hard-drive and it was painfully slow, all that was left was about 400mb, we borrowed his friends 1TB external hard-drive to free up 50GB and after a good defrag there was an imediate improvment...I
    thats the reason i need to set a default amount of space to be kept free to stop that a-hole from fillin it up. lol
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2009
  4. mrcapdown

    mrcapdown Regular member

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    Oh really ive not heard that before my main drives full all the time and ive never had it slow down on me, but i had a look around Google for you but i cant seem to find anything sorry
     
  5. varnull

    varnull Guest

    make sure you have 4 gigs free on the drive that has your pagefile.. that's why the performance drop.. it happens when the pagefile gets fragmented. I usually split a lump off right on the back end of the drive and hide it so people don't decide to put data on... seems to keep everything running over the 6 month reinstall or die limit that xp suffers.
     
  6. d4nnyboy

    d4nnyboy Member

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    thats sounds like it should do the trick, how do lump off and hide the space, is it similar to partioning?
     
  7. KillerBug

    KillerBug Active member

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    ...Or if noone else is using the system, just don't fill the drive up. His advise is good if you have lots of people using the system for downloads and such, but if it is just you, you can do it yourself. Again, this only applies to the drive where your page file is...you want to keep about 1GB more than the size of the page file free. As for other drives, you can fill them to within a few hundred MB of capacity without issue (other than defragging).
     
  8. d4nnyboy

    d4nnyboy Member

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    thanks for your input guys :)

    im learning summat new all the time

     

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