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External hard drive question

by gjd6599
6 replies
I have always been told that the hard drive on your computer should not be more than half full. Since I still run windows xp, with a 40 gig hd, I keep the info on it at 20 gb or below. But does this apply to external hard drives. I have a couple of 110 gig, external drives for storage, and they have 65 or 70 gig on each of them. Am I looking for trouble, or does it not apply to external drives.

Thanks
Glenn
#drive #external #hard #question
  • Profile picture of the author Brandon Tanner
    Originally Posted by gjd6599 View Post

    I have always been told that the hard drive on your computer should not be more than half full.
    Don't know where you heard that. You shouldn't have any problems until you start getting over @ 90% full.

    One of my external HD's stays at about 90% full from just MP3's. Never had any issues at all with it.
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  • Profile picture of the author System Wide Solutions
    I dont think this is correct. If your primary partition is more than 90% full, it may cause some problems like slow performance. But If your other drives only contains movies, mp3s..etc. It wont be a problem.Extra space is needed only for software installations as they need some more space when executing.
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  • Profile picture of the author TiredOfTheCube
    You don't want any hard drive, whether internal or external, to be too full. However, 50% full is pretty conservative. If you keep your hard drives less than 80% full you shouldn't have any problems. There are 2 important things to consider:

    1. Make sure all of the hard drives are backed up. I like Acronis software for that.

    2. If you have a choice of USB 2.0 or eSATA connections, choose eSATA. It is MUCH faster.
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  • Profile picture of the author porcupine73
    I think that might have been recommended because of how Windows file systems like to fragment files as much as possible and then add a few more fragments for good measure. With lots of free space it stands a better chance of defragging them successfully, especially if you have a lot of huge files.
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  • Profile picture of the author laurencewins
    Maybe you need a bigger hard drive? 40GB is very small. I have a 500GB hd and an external HD of 500GB for backups too.
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    Cheers, Laurence.
    Writer/Editor/Proofreader.

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  • Profile picture of the author bugtrack
    I dont think there will be any problem with your disk , unless its 90% + full , so dont worry about it
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