• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Synology DS918+ & HDDs (Windows / Defrag / Read & Write / Longevity)

F

FenFox

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 20, 2016
Messages
310
I have a few questions about Western Digital 10 TB Red & Seagate Ironwolf 10 TB HDD's.

1.) I currently use some of these drives in my Windows desktop PC. I'm wondering how much overhead (free storage space) I should leave to keep the read/writes running optimally and also so Windows can defrag them. This seems to be a highly controversial subject for some reason. I've seen people/articles suggest 15-20% for Windows Defrag. Others claim this is an outdated estimate and instead suggest 5% or even lower. Does anyone know for sure?

2.) I'll eventually be moving these drives over to my Synology DS918+ NAS and using RAID 5 or SHR-1 and the same question as above applies. If I want to keep the read & writes running optimally and if I want to keep them defragged via whatever software solution Synology uses, how much free space should I leave available?

The reason I'm asking these questions is because I have enough data to 'top off' these drives and then some, but I don't want to do it at the expense of performance/HDD longevity/the proper functioning of Windows/Synology defrag.
 
Windows - larger drives need less % (unless your files are just gigantic, like contiguous HD video or single-file VMs). You'd be fine with 5%, probably even lower. I'm sure you could calculate a specific number based on your single largest file stored on the drive.

Synology will probably use EXT4 (regardless of RAID physical layer, the file system is independent of that) - no defrag required, the file system auto-optimizes itself. Again, 5% is a good number, could probably be much lower.

Even if you fill them up entirely 100% and it can't defrag at all - it won't affect spinner drive life - just performance.
 
Brian_B said:
Windows - larger drives need less % (unless your files are just gigantic, like contiguous HD video or single-file VMs). You'd be fine with 5%, probably even lower. I'm sure you could calculate a specific number based on your single largest file stored on the drive.

Synology will probably use EXT4 (regardless of RAID physical layer, the file system is independent of that) - no defrag required, the file system auto-optimizes itself.
Click to expand...

I think the largest files are about 80-100 GB. However, others are much much smaller; we're talking Windows Notepad small. So what would you suggest as a % with files that large?
 
I'd say 2x your largest files size... on a 10T drive that's only like 2%.

If you get down into the weeds you could probably base it off block size and installed RAM size and get a lot less than that (since the drive is going to be doing read/writes at the block level).
 
Brian_B said:
I'd say 2x your largest files size... on a 10T drive that's only like 2%.

If you get down into the weeds you could probably base it off block size and installed RAM size and get a lot less than that (since the drive is going to be doing read/writes at the block level).
Click to expand...

Ok, so if my largest file on the drive is 100 GB, you're saying I should just leave 200 GB free? Or 2% of 9.09 TB is 181.8 gigabytes (for both Windows and the NAS?)
Hmm, based on my own personal use, I do notice the drives (in Windows) *seem to slow down a bit when they start to go into the red. Like 697 GB left of 9.09 TB.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top