Full harddisk, degraded performance?

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rahavsmt

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Jul 16, 2004
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I tried searching the forums and googled but haven't been able to find a definitive answer.

I've read that the harddisk performance will degrade after the hdd has been filled up to a certain percentage.

Until what point can I fill my hdd until I see a loss of performance? IIRC I've read that it is 90%.

How much loss of performance to be expected if I full my hdd to 100%?
 
not sure I have a definte answer either, but here's two things may come into play here

Hardware Limitation:
Harddrives record data from the outer edge of the disk with highest rotational speed and highest data rate towards the inner edge of the disk with the lowest data rate. Therefore the more you fill it up, the slower the read/write speeds will be, but ONLY on the data that is located in the inner tracks.

Software Limitation:
If this is your main OS drive, or course WindowXP and such will start dumping old pagefile data to make room for new data and will constantly annoy you with low disk space notifications (can be disabled).

Other than that, don't know. Of course fragmentation could have it's effects, but if this is a storage drive, lets say for videos that don't get moved and deleted much, that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
 
MrkXCeL's got really good points. The only other thing I'd say is don't worry so much about the % used... if you have 15+ GB you shouldn't experience any degradation in performance, seeing as how it's usually gradual as the drive fills.

When HDs were 20-80GB & >90% filled, leaving <5GB, then performance issues would become noticeable... b/c of pagefiles, DVD rips, & typical fragmentation

Check your drive real quick, if it's not highly fragmented & you still have sufficient free space, you're fine. If you're still not sure.... delete files & re-fragment, or whip out the credit card :)
 
MrkXCeL said:
Hardware Limitation:
Harddrives record data from the outer edge of the disk with highest rotational speed and highest data rate towards the inner edge of the disk with the lowest data rate. Therefore the more you fill it up, the slower the read/write speeds will be, but ONLY on the data that is located in the inner tracks.
Click to expand...
That is a little misleading. The problem doesn't exist on only the inner tracks. As a disk fills it gets slower and slower due to the reason stated above. However, you really can't pick a specific percent or point on the drive and call it the tipping point. As the data is written closer and closer the the center of the drive, the performance of accessing that data will decrease.

Look at the Raptor graph on this page:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167&p=2

As you can see, as more and more data that is put on the drive, the slower it gets. There is really no tipping point, although you could say it really starts to trail off at about 30GB on the Raptor. At 30GBs you are still pretty much near the outside edge of the drive. You have only used about a fifth of the drive.
 
Is it possible for me to set the location of a partition? Say I want to create an OS partition on the outer side of the hdd?

Therefore I can fill up my other partition of the hdd without bogging down the OS performance.
 
rahavsmt said:
Is it possible for me to set the location of a partition? Say I want to create an OS partition on the outer side of the hdd?
Click to expand...
With good partitioning software, yes. Good software allows you to specify the starting and stopping points of partitions on the drive. However, as far as I know, you don't need to worry about that when installing your OS to a blank disk. As far as I know, FDISK and Windows automatically start from the outside of the drive and work inwards when creating partitions.
 
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