I seem to recall reading somewhere (possibly even on this forum) that you should leave some space on your hard drive for defragmentation and probably other things as well. The number I have in my head is 10%.

My main internal hard drive (500 GB) now has 38 GB unused space (8%). Should I stop putting files on it and start using another drive? 38 GB seems like a lot of space to leave unused.

DIS

Hi
if you have a windows pc then the os will use some of that space as virtual memory (pagefile). Also, if you are using photoshop it will have a scratch disk using that space as well. Then files that you have open in office etc will also use tmp files which use up space as well.

get a new hdd or get an external drive and archive some of your old stuff to free up space.

hope this helps

btw if you are running vista upgrade to sp2 and you will prob get 20-40 gig extra free space in the process

Typically you need 15% free to reorganize and maintain a volume.

That advice is primarily for the HDD you boot off, as it tends to get a lot of temporary files written to it, and hence is more prone to fragmentation. For non system drives (the ones which don't have windows installed) fragmentation tends to be minimal.

The need for defragmentation is somewhat debatable nowadays as the disks are much faster and the file systems (you are formatted as NTFS?) are more fragmentation resistant. Still, it might be advisable to keep some spare disk space for other administration functions. I'm not sure how necessary this is in Windows, but Linux is happier if you keep 5% free.

I might be pointing out the obvious, but if you've filled 92% of a 500Gb disk you really need to buy another disk soon...

Thanks for the replies. I'm using Vista 64 bit, the 500 GB drive is for storage only; I use a VRaptor for the OS and applications. I have two 320 GB drives in the box; one is empty and I'm using the other for videos from my 5D Mk II.

My backup is to a DNS 321 NAS with two one terabyte drives organized as one volume. It sounds like it's time to start putting files on the empty 320 GB drive, which is, by the way, the scratch disk for Photoshop. However, I have 12 GB of RAM and have never seen PS use the scratch disk.

That advice is primarily for the HDD you boot off, as it tends to get a lot of temporary files written to it, and hence is more prone to fragmentation. For non system drives (the ones which don't have windows installed) fragmentation tends to be minimal.

Having pointed temporary file operations to smaller drives in my computer and maintaining data on separate drives as well, the drive housing my C: (system) and D: (applications) partitions seldom needs defragmenting because it hardly ever changes.

RDKirk wrote:
That advice is primarily for the HDD you boot off, as it tends to get a lot of temporary files written to it, and hence is more prone to fragmentation. For non system drives (the ones which don't have windows installed) fragmentation tends to be minimal.

Having pointed temporary file operations to smaller drives in my computer and maintaining data on separate drives as well, the drive housing my C: (system) and D: (applications) partitions seldom needs defragmenting because it hardly ever changes.

That mirrors my experience too. Last night, the weekly file backup and defrag operations I have scheduled ran. The G: drive, i.e. the 500 GB drive, took a long time to run and still had more than 1% fragmentation at the end. I ran it overnight again and it still has fragmentation. I'm running it yet again now and the utility told me at the beginning it will need 5:40 hours to complete the task! It appears that you really do need at least 10% free space for defragmentation to run efficiently.

I'm going to move some more files to an external drive and start using the empty 320 GB drive for storage. Boy, the 5D Mk II is just eating storage space like there's no tomorrow! Fabulous images though.