Hi Mark, On Fri, 04 May 2007 23:14:48 -0400, Mark Cassino wrote:
>I've got a real 'get it done' mindset on moving my digital photos from >DVD's and CD's to external hard drives. Unfortunately, my math seems to >have been off on how many of these external drives I'd need... > >Aside from the real vs nominal storage capacity issue, which I should >have anticipated, (the 500 gb drives I bought actually store 460 gb of >data)- Yes, that is the diffrence between 'decimal' gigabytes used by drive manufactures, and the binary-based calculations many operating systems use. 1 Gb = 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 1.000.000.000 bytes 1 GiB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1.073.741.824 bytes So that is a difference of over 7 percent. And of course larger numbers sell better :-) >as I close in on packing my first drive full I realize that hard >drives need some empty space to function properly. They do, if you update them a lot. Depending on the filesystems used, something like 10 to 20 percent remaining free is recommended, but mainly to prevent too much file fragmentation (and thus causing slow performance). For a data disk like this, used for backup (seldom updated) keeping just a few percent free is fine ... The filesystem itself also has a few percent overhead in directory and allocation structures (but so does the filesystem on a CD/DVD) >So the 500 gig drive only hold 460, and the 460 gig drive can't really >be filled up to 460 gigs... No, but 450 would be OK. >How much empty space does a hard drive need to work properly? I've seen >articles on the web that say a drive should not be filled beyond 80% of >capacity - wow, that would be a huge bite out of the storage space. Yes, but as said, that is mainly for heavily used (updated) disks. >I'm loading up the drives with what I consider to be static data. If I >re-work an image my scheme for organizing files calls for rolling the >new version forward onto a new drive (or at least a new directory.) So >once a drive is loaded with images, it should not change. I'm thinking >(hoping) the 80% rule may pertain more to drives used dynamically, new >data coming and going, and not for just archiving data. Exactly ... >I knew that you should not load drives to 100%, but I was planning on >leaving only about 10 gigs free on each drive. Is that reasonable? If >not - how much free space is needed? No 10 gigs is more than enough for that ... Regards, JvW ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jan van Wijk; http://www.dfsee.com/gallery -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
