how full should a drive get

[RobTi]

As above have a 1Tb drive for my films (no os only media) and it has only 40Gb left and the properties changed to red, is this the limit or how much can i flll ?
Robert

[kalniel]

You can fill another 40gb.

[jim]

Although if you want to defrag it's always helpful to have some spare space. I filled all of my drives up to their absolute limit before I got my server, never caused any problems at all.

[Zak33]

i never ever go above 75% full, because they grind toa slow halt above that in most stuff.

I think you need a new disk chap

[aidanjt]

It depends on the filesystem. But a general rule of thumb is completely filling a filesystem wont cause data loss. But it will make defragmenting impossible. And repeatedly and randomly deleting and creating files will produce killer fragmentation.

[Funkstar]

But if it's just for storing media, and you are not changing this data often, then fragmentation isn't a problem. grinding to a hault isn't a problem either, because that is probably down to fragmentation.

the red is just a warning by windows, telling you are running out of space. It does that on one of my RAID arrays, there is "only" a couple of hundred gig left.

[Singh400]

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Most of my disks have been all red at one point or another (untill I got my server up and running) and I didn't notice any performance slow downs.

[mycarsavw]

i never ever go above 75% full, because they grind toa slow halt above that in most stuff.

I think you need a new disk chap

This man has a storage fetish (so do I) but he's 100% right, time to add another 1Tb drive.

<goes off to look at HDDs on Scan>

[sammorris]

Pff, one TB drive? I need to buy my sixth - but on a more serious note, it depends what the drive is filled with. If it's nearly full up it won't defrag properly - if it stores TV, music etc that's no real issue, but if you install games to it it will want keeping clean so you can defrag on a regular basis. The fuller a drive gets, the slower it gets is true to an extent, but mainly when it contains loads of small files (e.g. installed software/games), not a moderate number of big ones (e.g. HD video)

[ascension]

I currently have a 640GB OS drive and 3 other drives of 500GB each. Previously, I've run a 500GB drive as well as a 250GB drive (both non-OS) to nearly 98% full and there was no problem with either

As for defragging, if you defrag regularly, then new file writes are likely to result in contiguous files, so fragmentation may not be a serious problem even under low space. And advanced 3rd party defrag utilities like Diskeeper 2009 can defrag even under very low space...I had a badly fragmented 160GB drive with only 5% free space, but Diskeeper was able to fully defrag it in auto defrag mode.

I've read that it's not a good idea to let OS drives get more than 85% full and it seems like a good limit. With the newer drives...the page file still has enough space to expand as required even with 5% free space on a 500GB drive As long as there is space for the page file to expand (and unfortunately, fragment) and for temp files to be created etc, the OS should be fine.

[sammorris]

perhaps because it's XP, but the PCs I run tend to fragment right from the off - copying a single file to an utterly blank drive, it will usually show up red in a defrag program and need defragmenting.