how much HDD to use?

[bobsmith1492]

I've heard your computer can really bog down if the disk is completely full; how much is considered 'full' ?
That is, if my laptop's 60 gig HDD has about 3 free, is it likely to slow things down? What if it got down to 1?

 

[InlineFive]

If you use Win2k/XP/2003 with an NTFS volume this won't happen in a noticeable degree for you. In the long run NTFS is much more resistant to corruption and fragmentation then FAT.

However, if the drive is your only volume, you will have slowdowns because Windows will run out of space for a Paging File.

 

[Pariah]

Anything less than about 20% free can cause considerable slow down. So ideally, you should have at least 15GB free on your drive. With only 3GB left you are WELL beyond the point of performance degradation. Once the drive is that full, the file system doesn't matter, because there is only so much space left to put the data. The file system can no longer efficiently store the data unfragmented and has to just squeeze it in where it can.

 

[Zepper]

For defrag and scandisk to work well, there should be at least 15% free on each logical drive (drive letter). Reduce the size of your recycle bins to give more space flexibility. Default trashcan is 10% and you usually don't need anywhere near that much on a large drive - I usually run at between 1 and 5%.
.bh.