Free Space to Maintain in Your Hard Drive
What’s the ideal free space to maintain on your computer’s hard drive? Most experts has recommended that at least 20% free space of the hard drive should be kept free so that this extra space can be used to store temporary files by applications you use, defragmentation programs, or new files/programs that you add in to you computer. You can consider to upgrade your hard drive if the free space in your hard drive has reduced less than 20%.
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March 7th, 2007 18:38
using percentage to gauge the amt needed is not realistic..
20% of 100GB is 20Gb of free space for temporary files is too much..
I would typically maintain at least 10GB for application and OS swap space especially if the amt of physical memory is less than 1GB
my $0.02 worth of though..
March 7th, 2007 23:57
With respect to your free space estimate, the following:
As a rule of thumb, observe these rules:
Disregarding fragmentation issues, above 60% used on a harddrive noticeable performance degradation sets in. Above [60*sqrt2(=approx. 1.4)]=84% performance is virtually not worth mentioning, i.e. more than exponentially declines! Defragmenting might even not work.