Nearly full hard drive

[madoka]

Bought a 10tb hard drive last week and formatted it to 9.1tb. Transferred in my iTunes library which was 8.6tb large, so I have about 0.5tb left on the drive. I use an SSD as my main drive, so this is just a data drive.

Will I have any performance or reliability issues from filling the drive to near capacity?

 

[Elixer]

Bought a 10tb hard drive last week and formatted it to 9.1tb. Transferred in my iTunes library which was 8.6tb large, so I have about 0.5tb left on the drive. I use an SSD as my main drive, so this is just a data drive.

Will I have any performance or reliability issues from filling the drive to near capacity?

Well, the more you fill up the HD, the higher the access times there is to place new data, so, it transfers slower because of the way they are made. This is why when you bench a drive the graph looks like:

Starts out fast, then gets slower...
You won't have reliability issues though. (Well, not from filling it up at least).
Really sucks to backup these big drives as well.

 

[corkyg]

I always leave at least 20% of an HDD free to allow for normal drive maintenance. HDDs have to be able to move files around. That requires free space.

 

[VirtualLarry]

What about redundancy for your library? Have you considered a 4x8TB or 4x10TB RAID-5 NAS unit, like a QNAP or Synology? Or would streaming your music over the LAN be a problem? You would have the advantage of being able to use the music library with multiple machines, I think, too.

Then again, I don't use iTunes, so I don't know if there are any application restrictions, like only being able to store your music library on a local disk, or something like that.

 

[bigboxes]

Bought a 10tb hard drive last week and formatted it to 9.1tb. Transferred in my iTunes library which was 8.6tb large, so I have about 0.5tb left on the drive. I use an SSD as my main drive, so this is just a data drive.

Will I have any performance or reliability issues from filling the drive to near capacity?

8.6TB? Are we talking lossless here? Exactly how much music is that (albums/tracks) and how do you afford that?

 

[madoka]

What about redundancy for your library? Have you considered a 4x8TB or 4x10TB RAID-5 NAS unit, like a QNAP or Synology? Or would streaming your music over the LAN be a problem? You would have the advantage of being able to use the music library with multiple machines, I think, too.

I transferred from a 16tb Drobo. I hated having to keep the Drobo on 24/7, the lag while it connected to my computer, and connection issues. So I got the largest HD I could find.

I'm waiting for the 14tb drives to ship so I could switch over to them.

 

[bigboxes]

I transferred from a 16tb Drobo. I hated having to keep the Drobo on 24/7, the lag while it connected to my computer, and connection issues. So I got the largest HD I could find.

I'm waiting for the 14tb drives to ship so I could switch over to them.

I have over 20TB of storage space in my file server. JOBD. It's responsive and latency were slow just like you described. To remedy that I turned off all power management and installed an SSD as the boot drive. Difference was night and day. It was like the drives were local in my machine.

 

[KMFJD]

I transferred from a 16tb Drobo. I hated having to keep the Drobo on 24/7, the lag while it connected to my computer, and connection issues. So I got the largest HD I could find.

I'm waiting for the 14tb drives to ship so I could switch over to them.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...ng-pm1633a-ssd-15tb-storage-drive-specs-price

15 tb ssd....

 

[aigomorla]

Why would you care about performance issues if its just a itunes drive?
Its not like your gonna hammer 100mb/s+ of data when reading a .mp3 or flac file..

Also make sure u constantly back that drive up with your drobo...
You'll seriously cry when you lose that data due to the drive failing, especially on a seagate.

 

[wildhorse2k]

Well, the more you fill up the HD, the higher the access times there is to place new data, so, it transfers slower because of the way they are made. This is why when you bench a drive the graph looks like:

Starts out fast, then gets slower...
You won't have reliability issues though. (Well, not from filling it up at least).
Really sucks to backup these big drives as well.

This is not true. On magnetic drives you can record more data on outer edge of the disc and since the RPM is constant transfer speed is fastest on the outer edge. The historical 1.44MB floppy discs had fixed geometry so transfer speed didn't vary, but the capacity was unnecessarily limited by the inner edge of the disc.

So the dropping transfer speed is completely unrelated to disc being full. A full disc can also have good access times as long as data is not too much fragmented. It depends on how it is filled up.

 

[Elixer]

This is not true. On magnetic drives you can record more data on outer edge of the disc and since the RPM is constant transfer speed is fastest on the outer edge. The historical 1.44MB floppy discs had fixed geometry so transfer speed didn't vary, but the capacity was unnecessarily limited by the inner edge of the disc.

So the dropping transfer speed is completely unrelated to disc being full. A full disc can also have good access times as long as data is not too much fragmented. It depends on how it is filled up.

If you want to throw in corner cases in, sure, but, normally, the file system is smart enough not to scatter the data all around the HD, and in most cases it will mimic the graph.