Approximately what is the maximum percentage fullness an XP system drive
should be? (Including all system and data files.)

Don't allow space for growth as I will add in the extra space from my
own figures for rate of growth of my own data.

I have the impression that when the fullness gets big then performance
and perhaps even reliability/recovery will suffer and that this
increases quite quickly beyond a certain value of fullness.

Of course there's not going to be a single fixed max value for all home
systems but is there a very rough rule of thumb?



50% to 60% ?

60% to 70% ?

705 to 80% ?

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Joe S <js@foldback.net> wrote:



On Unix systems it is customary to reserve 5% for the super-user that
cannot be allocated by anubody else. Of course UNIX filesystems are
much better tuned that anything MS has ever produced, so you may want
to leave 10% or so unused. Take care that free-space + used-space < 100%
because of unusable space at the end of files.

Arno

"Joe S" <js@foldback.net> wrote in message
news:Xns98F373A3E18EC74C1H4@127.0.0.1...
The Microsoft defragmenter wants 15% free space or it complains (but will
still run). I'm running at 90% full at the moment with no problems. I
approach 98% temporarily when running Audacity (which creates large
temporary files). This has not caused me any problems but I wouldn't
recommend it. One time you could hit a problem at this extreme is if the
swap file needs to grow and space is lacking.

Joe S wrote:
I question whether it is important to keep a certain percentage free.
Instead, I would think the preferable amount would depend on the average
size of files you create. So long as I have a few gigs free I am
satisfied whether it's a 25 gig drive or a 250 gig drive.

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:22:04 GMT, Joe S <js@foldback.net>
wrote:

This is an invalid question, there is no such thing as a
maximum percentage fullness requirement.

All you need is enough free space to produce the files the
OS and application use during running. That is a fixed size
per the use, it does not depend on percentage at all.

For example, your use might require 800MB of free space.
That is 10% of a 8,000 MB HDD, but only 0.1% of a 800,000 MB
HDD.

However, the more free space you have, particularly having
that free space unfragmented, will increase performance.



It is always allowing "space for growth" of some kind,
because otherwise there would be no purpose at all to having
even 1 byte of free space. So if it isn't your data as-in,
"user" files, it could be files generated like temporary
files by photoshop as scratch space, or an internet browser
temporary files, or growth of a pagefile, it really doesnt'
matter what caused it.


I think you are taking a backwards approach, the goal is not
to consider this at all. Your focus should be that if there
is excessive fragmentation, to minimize it. If there isn't
enough free space for what you do, make the space available.

Performance is not a matter of amount free space, directly,
only if there is enough and it can be accessed in most
efficient manner possible (contiguous reading and writing
instead of a lot of seeking to different drive locations)



No, do not ever think in percentages. It is always an
absolute figure that is independant of percentage of total
space on a drive, and will vary by the use of the system.