Mechanical Drives Performance Question

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Nov 19, 2003
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How much free space needs to be on a drive in order for performance not to degrade? Im putting all my games on 640gb caviar black. I remember if you filled a drive all the way full it would start to get slow and just bog down.
 
pretty sure you can fill it right up to the top, but you will get fragmenting very fast. set a regular defrag schedule and you should be able to go right up to 99% of capacity or so. SSDs are what start to slow down when they start getting full. also your hard drive will warn you when youre out of disk space, and that doesnt in itself mean itll be slow, just means that you cant store any more info on it which could suck if its your C:\\ drive.
 
How much free space needs to be on a drive in order for performance not to degrade? Im putting all my games on 640gb caviar black. I remember if you filled a drive all the way full it would start to get slow and just bog down.

Besides fragmentation most 3.5 inch drives read / write the inner tracks at about 50 to 60% of their outer track STR so keep that in mind. Look at HDTune graphs to see examples of this. Where you want to put your cutoff is up to you. Also you could create a second partition for non frequently used stuff and move that to the inner tracks so that the stuff you want to use more often is in the fastest part of the disk. That assumes you have data that is infrequnetly accessed. I have many TBs of this type of data..

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Besides fragmentation most 3.5 inch drives read / write the inner tracks at about 50 to 60% of their outer track STR so keep that in mind...

This.

imho, on most drives, only the first 25% of a mechanical drive is "really good" and performance tends to start falling off after that fast. The 2nd 25% is "good", the bottom half really starts to stink. Drives with 500gb per platter or more seem to suffer this problem less with only about the bottom 25% being too crummy to use.

How much free space needs to be on a drive in order for performance not to degrade? Im putting all my games on 640gb caviar black. I remember if you filled a drive all the way full it would start to get slow and just bog down.

OP - Get the free version of HDTune and run it against your 640gb black and I think you'll see why I recommend the following - try not to use any more than 75% of it - worst case. Assuming you are on Windows 7, which allows you to increase a partition size at will, initially do not format any more of it than you have to, and just increase the partition size when you need more space.
 
Ok I think I got it, so if my goal is to fill one drive 640gb to 75% capacity with games how do I only format 75% of it? Im on windows 7: I go to control panel, admin tools, computer management, disk management, ????
 
i go start menu, right click on "my computer," click "manage." on the left near the bottom theres a menu option called "disk properties" or something and once there you just right click on the disk you want and choose "shrink volume." then shrink it by 25%, or 160000mb, and youre good. i think. i cant do any of this here at work so im going from memory. :/ someone can correct me if im wrong.
 
pretty sure you can fill it right up to the top, but you will get fragmenting very fast. set a regular defrag schedule and you should be able to go right up to 99% of capacity or so. SSDs are what start to slow down when they start getting full. also your hard drive will warn you when youre out of disk space, and that doesnt in itself mean itll be slow, just means that you cant store any more info on it which could suck if its your C:\\ drive.

Depends on the format. NTFS will fragment very quickly once the drive becomes full, but if you are on a non-Windows system, Ext4, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS, and HFS+ will all work perfectly with minimal, if any, fragmentation.

Also, yes, SSDs will degrade in performance once they become too full.
 
Ok I think I got it, so if my goal is to fill one drive 640gb to 75% capacity with games how do I only format 75% of it? Im on windows 7: I go to control panel, admin tools, computer management, disk management, ????

Yep. You'll have to pull out a calculator or do a little math in your head to figure out how to grow/shrink your partition the correct amount.

i go start menu, right click on "my computer," click "manage." on the left near the bottom theres a menu option called "disk properties" or something and once there you just right click on the disk you want and choose "shrink volume." then shrink it by 25%, or 160000mb, and youre good. i think. i cant do any of this here at work so im going from memory. :/ someone can correct me if im wrong.

Close, the menu option is "Disk Management". It helps prior to attempting to shrink a partition a lot with Windows on it to first turn off hibernation, delete restore points and disable the page file, then defrag. Windows will allow you to shrink quite a bit more then, and of course renable those features after the shrink.
 
Ok so I calculated 640gb is 596.05, so 75% of it comes out to 447.0375, I'll format that, and fill that all the way. I won't have to worry about going over 75% of the drive capacity. Thanks guys.
 
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