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Hard Drive Question - OK to fill one partition?

Ketchup

Ketchup

Elite Member
Computer is not in the sig - it is my file/media server.

Main drive is a 1 TB with two partitions - one is running the OS (50 GB), about 50% full; the rest (880 GB) is storage. The storage part about 83% full. Do you think there is any part before 100% (880) that I should get concerned?
 
No, filesystems don't like it when available free space is down to zero. In fact, you should keep 5% free at all times.
 
It's not generally great for performance for a filesystem to be filled to more than about 80-90% or so. If I were you, I'd be looking for a storage upgrade. 2-3 TB hard drives are so cheap, that I think it's an easy upgrade to recommend.

As a rule of thumb, when you fill a filesystem to 60-70% capacity, that's a good time to plan for your next upgrade, informed by how long it took you to fill to 50-60%, and how quickly you expect to be adding new data in the near future.
 
Thanks all. I have another terabyte drive with more free space in the server, so I can start moving things around when it comes down to it.
 
My choice is always to leave sufficient space for regular drive maintenance.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Until the filesystem fills up, corrupts, and you lose data. Sure, keep using it until it fills up...
Click to expand...

Eh, show me one case where this would happen on a modern filesystem.

There is no modern filesystem where, if you fill it 100% up, that it will corrupt so you lose data. At most, it will say 'I ran out of room, I can't write this file!'

Now, if we are talking about the hardware side, as in, you start to have bad blocks/sectors, then the HD will start to use the reserved sectors, so, your info should still be safe, until the time the HD finally craps out, then you lost all your data.

But, this is also why you keep backups, since these things happen.

For performance reasons, you may wish to limit how filled you want the HD, but that highly depends on what filesystem you are using.
 
corkyg said:
My choice is always to leave sufficient space for regular drive maintenance.
Click to expand...

Can you be more specific here 'regular drive maintenance'? I would assume you are referring to fragmentation, but if something further please share.

I have found that outside of the OS partition, fragmentation on the other partition and the other drive is not an issue. Makes sense to me, as data is only being added to the next available sectors, and there aren't applications that would be constantly writing to/changing files.
 
ketchup79 said:
Can you be more specific here 'regular drive maintenance'? I would assume you are referring to fragmentation, but if something further please share....
Click to expand...

I refer to file movements that occur during Optimization as well as editing of imagery. Of course, all in non-OS spindle drives. I say "regular" because I do these things nearly daily.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Until the filesystem fills up, corrupts, and you lose data. Sure, keep using it until it fills up...
Click to expand...
Data won't be lost or corrupted. Any file system that does that is inherently broken.

What will actually happen is degraded write performance or (at worst) "disk full" errors.
 
BFG10K said:
Data won't be lost or corrupted. Any file system that does that is inherently broken.

What will actually happen is degraded write performance or (at worst) "disk full" errors.
Click to expand...

This is what I am thinking as well. I know FAT would get really upset when the drive was over 3/4 full. I have seen a few instances of full NTFS drives, but they had the OS on them, and I was only there to clean up/clone to something bigger, so I wasn't privy to any data loss that may have occurred.
 
ketchup79 said:
Makes sense to me, as data is only being added to the next available sectors, and there aren't applications that would be constantly writing to/changing files.
Click to expand...

I have a question here. What happens when you add more data to an existing folder? Does it point to the sector the file(s) are beeing written or does it defragment?
 
ArisVer said:
I have a question here. What happens when you add more data to an existing folder? Does it point to the sector the file(s) are beeing written or does it defragment?
Click to expand...

Folder is only used at the software level. Physically, the data goes to the next empty spot on the disk (starting from the beginning). The file system really doesn't care where the data is on the drive. If the spot is not large enough to hold the file, it will put the rest of the file in the next open location, so you would now have a file in fragments.
 
How can you do that if the disk is full and there is no empty space? Anyway, that is not my concern since I will always have enough freeboard to allow my boat to weather stormy waters. 🙂
 
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