Full vs Partial HDD: Lifespan

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kpoverdorf

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Is it true that a HDD which is full or near full will suffer from accelerated wear and tear?

For example: I have a 2TB HDD (not OS HDD) that only has 2GB of free space. Is that harming the HDD?

Again, this scenario is only referring to a HDD that the operating system or programs are NOT running on. Strictly for data storage.
 
Is it true that a HDD which is full or near full will suffer from accelerated wear and tear?
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I do not think so. And wear and tear is not always the cause of hard drive death.

I have a 2TB HDD (not OS HDD) that only has 2GB of free space. Is that harming the HDD?
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No. Writing data to every sector is not harmful. In the past a normal format would do that. Now the default is quick since we generally do not want to wait 2 hours or more to format.
 
I figured that much. I'm sure if it was the OS drive it would be a different story as far as performance goes.
 
@drescherjm
Well, a nearly full harddrive means the areas full of data are stagnant, and the free areas where temporary files are being written to get passed over constantly.

Would that accelerate the wear of that part of the harddrive?

If you defrag the harddrive regularly, and the static files get pushed to one side, does the less used site that gets written and overwritten by temporary files get worn out faster?
 
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Writing to a full HDD can cause performance issues as the data you write will be written to all the 'leftover chunks' that are not claimed. But this does mean very high fragmentation and thus low speeds.

Generally, never full up a filesystem more than 85% capacity. But this doesn't have anything to do with HDDs directly, but rather with filesystems. It also doesn't cause any additional wear, but just lower performance.
 
a drive thats filled with pseudo random noise is indistinguishable from a blank drive from a longevity or performance standpoint, and to a drive's firmware, what is an NTFS volume aside from pseudo random noise?
 
sub.mesa said:
Writing to a full HDD can cause performance issues as the data you write will be written to all the 'leftover chunks' that are not claimed. But this does mean very high fragmentation and thus low speeds.

Generally, never full up a filesystem more than 85% capacity. But this doesn't have anything to do with HDDs directly, but rather with filesystems. It also doesn't cause any additional wear, but just lower performance.
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When you refer to a filesystem are you talking about a NTFS or FAT32 partition? Basically any HDD should not be filled more than 85% capacity due to a possible performance decrease. Even when talking about a NTFS HDD that is not running an Operation System or programs.
 
Leaving some free space for the filesystem is not really relevant in your situation, unless you are still writing to the 2GB of free space that is left. If it were an OS drive, which gets a lot of writes to it during use, then it would be an issue since the filesystem would probably be fragmented, and the HDD would need to do a lot of seeks when it is written to. But since you specified NOT an OS drive, that does not apply.

In any case, the additional wear and tear from extra seeks is probably not worth worrying about.
 
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