On Wednesday, April 13, 2005, at 07:47AM, Shel Belinkoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Last night someone mentioned that you "shouldn't" use more than 50% of the >space available on a hard drive. I've never heard such a thing, and was >unable to get an explanation as to why. Anyone care to comment? Lots of free space on a volume minimizes the need for an operating system's file management services to split files up into discontiguous blocks (this is fragmentation). When data is read or written from a drive in contiguous blocks, the IO operations are much faster. Depending upon how sophisticated the controller/device driver/OS are, as free space goes down the OS slows and can become "confused" ... that is, timing delays on small service routines can add up to errors if the file system gets too slow or the drive is always wasting a lot of time in seeking blocks. I try to leave 20-30% of a volume's capacity as free space. 50% is a bit much, and 10% is getting to a critical point in my experience. I'm about to start a major reorganization and cleanup on my home volume as I'm down to 12G out of 157G free space ... system performance is down. I'll move all data files out to a secondary drive volume and recopy all the files I want to keep on the home volume back after reformatting and reinstalling the OS and applications. That will ensure that the volume has much more free space and is not fragmented. Godfrey
