...But do you guys have like a mental threshold as to how much free space you mentally do not want to lose on your hard drive?

Mine is 300Gbs free. I try and keep my laptop's hard drive at least 300Gbs free. What is yours if you have one?

11 years ago*

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Mine is 1 kb.

11 years ago
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+1 Squeeze it as much as you can!!!

11 years ago
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700Mb free on steam+downloads partition (now)

11 years ago
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same here :$

11 years ago
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I try to keep somewhere between 200 and 250 gb free

11 years ago
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I think if I dropped below 100Gb free on each of my drives, i'd start deleting things

11 years ago
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Mine is 1 MB.

11 years ago
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10% of the HDD size...since mine is 232 GB I keep over 25GB empty at all times.

11 years ago
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its never even crossed my mind to keep free space tbh, i just dont fill my drive with stuff i wont use/play etc.

11 years ago
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Not strange at all. It's advisable to keep around 10% of your total hdd free like what megagiga said so that your Virtual RAM has enough space to work. I like to keep mine above the 50gig threshold.

Edit - Should say Virtual Memory for clarification

11 years ago
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Virtual Memory is so overrated nowadays :P

11 years ago
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128MB

11 years ago
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I have an easily expandable fileserver at home, so whenever i'm running low, i just connect another HDD which means i don't really need to care about free space

11 years ago
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15GB on each partition.

11 years ago
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About 100GB on each 1TB drive. I learned the hard way.

11 years ago
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once time, my game drive dropped to 0 byte

11 years ago
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Depending on disk type, I have a couple smaller ones for O/S and temporary stuff, and 2 bigger ones, 1TB one for Steam games and a 300GB one for non-steam stuff, usually F2P.

I usually start cleaning the big one when I drop under 80GB, and the small ones when under 10-15GB...

11 years ago
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Around 100 GB free, dunno why xD

11 years ago
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Optimally 20% should be left as free space on any boot drive and on the others its pretty irrelevant... More importantly data is automatically written onto the hard drive starting with the outer most track of each platter and then is progressively written further in. As the outer most tracks have a greater capacity than the inner ones due to the nature of the laws of circumference a larger amount of data can be accessed without having to move the arm onto which the laser for read and write operations is mounted which is by far the slowest step. So basically your hdd will get slower the more you have on it in theory, and in practice its not quite so simple because the order in which data is written onto the hdd might be somewhat affected though as a general rule it will still on average get slower with each bit of additional data stored.

11 years ago
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LOL SSD FTW
You never want to go back to HDD for bootdrive.

If you worry about data access speed on inner region of a platter, just short stroke your HDD, and never worry.
In my pre SSD period, I always made a 50 GB partition for OS, and the remaining space for data. This has the same effect as shortstroking (if OS partition is made in beginning of disk) for the OS files, and still have capacity for not so often accessed data on the other partition.

11 years ago
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Yeah ssd's are definitely the way to go but lots of people dont have one yet... Shortstroking is very effective, but installing the OS to a small partition on the outside of the disk is a bit pointless if you still plan on using the whole disk, firstly because if you install the OS to a blank hdd it will always start with the outer most tracks of the selected partition, so if the whole drive is one partition it will start on the outside anyway. Secondly if you have data in the center of the platter the drive will need to read from there from time to time and you will just have to hope the following read operation isnt from the outer tracks or the arm will have to swing all the way out which takes forever

11 years ago
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when my pc slows down i clean it.

11 years ago
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I'm quite tidy now with my hard-drives so I don't really need to think about it but, as a general rule, I'd suggest having at least a 20-30% free space on each drive.
Both mechanical and solid state drives benefit from having free space.

11 years ago
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10 GB

11 years ago
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Since I use SSD for OS, I tend to start to clear data drives up once there @ about 100GB, these are for 1TB drives, I just don't like it when they're filled with crap, and once it hits 100GB left, that tells me .. I have a lot of crap I am not using, I need to remove :P

11 years ago
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What's a HDD...? o.O

11 years ago
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Hard disk drive. Basically what everything is saved onto.

11 years ago
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Hard drive disk.

11 years ago
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High D-Definition

11 years ago
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8.17 of 175GB.

11 years ago
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Around 20GB.

11 years ago
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Same here.

11 years ago
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I partition my HDD so it depends on their sizes :V

11 years ago
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100GB

11 years ago
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When I'm running low ~200 GB I just buy another hard drive.

11 years ago
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Closed 11 years ago by EntrustedOne.