How much free space should i have on hard drive

SSDs add a new layer to this. Wear Leveling and Write Amplification. For these reasons you want more free space than you absolutely need on traditional hard drives. You still don't want to fill the drive but with SSDs the immediate effect isn't there and the reason why is different. From what I understand, it also depends on the file system on the drive. Some file systems are more resilient to things like disk fragmentation.

Yes, depends on usage and underlying storage system. Some systems, like high end SAN based disk arrays laugh at file fragmentation making the only system impact of fragmentation is OS overhead in scattering things all over hither and yon. Other systems, like laptop, drives are another story all together. And that doesn't get into newer file systems, such as ZFS, where the concept of a hard limit to space is nebulous at best. NTFS is its own beast, of course.

You really don't want to get much below a GB free on C:. If the growth rate is higher, adjust it down to get notified in time I'd heard that - despite the page file's relatively small size - that leaving that much room can speed things up. I believe it was from the very helpful book "PC Hacks" published a few years ago.

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Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Tom Nelson. Facebook Twitter. Updated on February 17, Tweet Share Email. Apple Macs iPad. Was this page helpful? Has there been any research, preferably published in a peer-reviewed journal […]? Bibliography Marshall K. McKusick, William N. Joy, Samuel J. Leffler, and Robert S.

Fabry Volume 2 issue 3. Archived at cornell. Ray Duncan Design goals and implementation of the new High Performance File System. Microsoft Systems Journal. Volume 4 issue 5. Archived at wisc. Karels, and John S. Quarterman The Design and Implementation of the 4. Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN Dan Bridges Significant Bits.

Keith A. Smith and Margo Seltzer Archived at harvard. Steve D. Pate John Wiley amp; Sons. Amir H. Majidimehr Prentice Hall. Bill Calkins Inside Solaris 9. Que Publishing.

Anand Lal Shimpi Archived at stanford. Does Windows trim unpartitioned unformatted space on an SSD? Improve this answer. G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica' 7, 19 19 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 77 77 bronze badges. Add a comment. Though I can't talk about "research" being published by "peer reviewed journals" - and I wouldn't want to have to rely on those for day-to-day work - I can though talk about the realities of hundreds of production servers under a variety of OSes over many years: There are three reasons why a full disk reduces performance: Free space starvation: Think of temp files, Updates, etc.

File system degradation: Most file systems suffer in their ability to optimally lay out files if not enough room is present Hardware level degradation: SSDs and SMR disks without enough free space will show decreased throughput and - even worse - increased latency sometimes by many orders of magnitude The first point is trivial, especially since no sane production system would ever use swap space in dynamically expanding and shrinking files.

Recommendations I realize that I mentioned how to make sure a max fill rate is enforced. Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Use a ready-made solution if it fits you, else parse the output of df -h and let alarm bells go of in case. This can save you from 30 kernels on a root fs with automatic-upgrades installed and running without the autoremove option. Weigh the potential disruption of a fs overflow against the cost of making it bigger in the first place: If you are not on an embedded device, you might just double those 4G for root.

Community Bot 1. Eugen Rieck Eugen Rieck This is helpful: it is more detailed, and has greater explanatory power, than the typical anecdote. I upvoted it accordingly. But I really want more solid evidence than just, "someone on the internet says that this is their experience". I like to think while reading this answer, an important note is that there is no 'end-all' answer, and that you may find more details you were looking for by thinking about each use case.

I definitely understood how to solve the problem better here when Eugen listed what significant processes might use that last available space. The first point isn't trivial now that the systemd cancer has eaten most distros. Eugen Rieck--I hate to say but your answer is about a what do you do; and b why it is useful. I don't see any pointers toward relevant research, e. Note that the original question was about actual not necessarily peer-reviewed research.

That's why your college degree didn't actually prepare you for this issue. Windows will only partially defragment the drive, and it will grow increasingly fragmented over time. However, this just applies to mechanical hard drives that need defragmentation, and not the solid-state drives generally found in more modern PCs. Solid-state drives traditionally needed a large chunk of available free space, too. This overprovisioning actually means the solid state drive has more memory than it exposes to you.

You can afford to use more of the drive and fill it up with more data. All Microsoft will tell you is that you need 20 GB of space before you install a bit Windows 10 system on a modern PC. The rules of thumb can help. It really depends on the SSD. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one? Browse All Android Articles Browse All Smart Home Articles Customize the Taskbar in Windows Browse All Microsoft Office Articles What Is svchost.

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