Filling up a hard drive....

A long time back I heard the advice that you should always leave at least 10% of a hard drive blank when considering it full and if a little blank space isn't left, it could lead to data corruption, errors, problems, etc..... I've always followed this advice but at this point I'm not even sure where I heard it from, if it's true or if 10% is really even the "magic" number (maybe 5%,15% or some other value is the better number at this point...or maybe leaving blank space is a total waste).
So, I'm curious, is it considered a good practice to leave a certain percentage of a hard drive blank when considering it as full? If so, how much blank space is usually considered as adequate? Does it matter if the drive is simply an external backup vs. the main drive in the computer? I appreciate any input

This is based on my experience and nothing else.

One of my computers has a 500 Gig hard drive that I basically just dump stuff on until I get around to processing the data. That drive has at times been within 10 megs or less of full for weeks at a time. I have never lost data on it, it has never corrupted data and has in no way slowed down my PC.

I would never load my OS drive in this manner though. I also turn off paging file allocation for storage drives.

For the OS disk, definitely leave a little free space, a few gig or so. For data disks, not so much, but you need 20% free space or so to defragment.

If your drives are that full migrate the data to a bigger drive and use that one as a backup.

If you use an SSD - NEVER EVER fill it completely up. It will slow to a crawl and cause lots of problems.

For a regular HD, you can fill them up as long as it is not either your boot/OS drive or the drive where your virtual memory file resides. That would cause a big slowdown and possibly odd errors as usually there are temporary file location on the OS drive which will inevitably get stuff in them and possibly cause issues if there is no room.

tim wrote in post #14156645
For the OS disk, definitely leave a little free space, a few gig or so. For data disks, not so much, but you need 20% free space or so to defragment.

If your drives are that full migrate the data to a bigger drive and use that one as a backup.

What he said...

Numenorean wrote in post #14156756
If you use an SSD - NEVER EVER fill it completely up. It will slow to a crawl and cause lots of problems.

Apart from having to leave some space for swap that isn't really true for most of the newer SSDs, which keep aside space dedicated for the controller (so that the usable space is less than the drive capacity).

Have a look at this:
http://www.anandtech.c​om …octane-128gb-ssd-review/6

Keep in mind the more you fill it the more seek time and the harder the moving parts have to work. You can also never really wipe a drive clean after filling it up as it just gets written over in time. This obviously leads to more heat (heat is the biggest killer) and thus a shorter life span. As the platters get hot they expand and if/when the arms finally make contact you are SOL.

Defragging often will help prolong the life of your drives and keep them running at optimal speeds. This of course does not apply to non mechanical SSE drives where data speed remains constant throughout. So if you want your drives to live long and proper don't forget to defrag and always do it after a fresh boot. I would only ever fill a storage specific drive and always try to keep your OS drive about 25% empty. It's wasted space but it's also valuable space which NTFS can often times use to remap bad sectors as the drive begins to die.

http://www.ntfs.com/da​ta-integrity.htm

Thanks for the advice.....it's appreciated

If it's a storage disk where you just add new info, you can fill it 100% full (and suffer Windows contantly complaining that it's full).

If you regularly add/remove files, then there are two main reasons to not fill it full.
1) Constant add/remove leads to fragmentation. And the defragger needs some free space.
2) An almost full disk will fragment much faster because there aren't so many options left when the OS is looking for available holes for the next file to store.