Noob question

[Greco101]

Dumb question here... but I honestly can't find a straight forward answer anywhere... not even after perusing through my A+ book. I'm sure it's in there but couldn't find it.

How much headroom should be left on a hdd? Why exactly do you need it? :neutral:

[TheGreatSatan]

I don't see why you would need any

[mtekk]

How much headroom should be left on a hdd? Why exactly do you need it? :neutral:

What exactly do you mean by headroom? If you are talking about space above or below the drive (i.e., spacing between drives.) then you really don't need any, but you may want a, let's say 1/8 to 1/4 inch gap for airflow so that a fan can be put infront of them for cooling.

If you are talking about leaving freespace on the disks, (i.e., you have Windows running on it) then you may want to leave up to 1GB free for the Windows swap files. You can go as low as 100MB without XP complaining too much, and nothing really bad will happen until there is less than 10MB. Otherwise if you run out of swap space, then Windows won't have any additional memory beyond your physical RAM which will cause some severe performance hits (if you thought disk swapping was bad, this is much worse). For disks that don't have Windows running on them (i.e., storage only disks) you can fill them to the brim with data and Windows could care less. In Linux you can just about fill the entire thing up as there (usually) is a separate swap partition.

[Greco101]

Thanks mtekk, that's exactly the information I was looking for!

My buddy tells me his mom's desktop has 5mb's left on the main and only hdd... he tells me that it's "****ed up." I knew only 5mb's being on the hdd had to me a lot of the reason but I couldn't answer him why. The computer is an old vaio...P4 2.0GHz, 512mb's of ram... 80gb hdd, I believe, so I'm sure that "performance hit" you're mentioning is the "****ed up" he's mentioning haha.

[mtekk]

Only 5mb left, wow. Combine that with any viruses or spyware it may have and I could see how it is running "%^$!ed up" according to him. He's lucky to have XP, windows 98 would literally crash on me if it had less than about 80MB of free space. Maybe he should consider getting a bigger hard drive, or delete some things off of it.

[Airbozo]

Have him run the disk cleanup wizard. It will remove the old files and temp internet stuff. Having only 5MB left is not good since the system may need to resize the page file to accommodate the programs running. Also have him check the size of the page file.

mtekk; Yes Win98 was very temperamental about disk space. XP is a little more forgiving, but when you get to 95% full things start to go wonky. (official M$ approved technical computer term.) ;)

[mtekk]

XP is a little more forgiving, but when you get to 95% full things start to go wonky. (official M$ approved technical computer term.) ;)

"Wonky" is an official MS approved technical computer term eh? I always preferred "flaky" to describe instability, I wonder what else makes that list... :think:

[jdbnsn]

Why do you post every single one of your hardware questions in the chatterbox?

[Scotty]

I always leave around 10GB on my HDDs, just to keep performance good.

[crenn]

It's advisable to leave 10-15% of drive to free space.... I don't follow this rule personally!

[Greco101]

Why do you post every single one of your hardware questions in the chatterbox?

It seems more sensible to post here since it's a quick question and once it's over with, it will eventually be lost forever in the depths of the chatterbox.

Also, I didn't believe it was "fix it shop" worthy since it was a question about how something works, not really anything needing to be fixed. I told him to delete some stuff, run disk cleanup. He also chose to run ccleaner and it was done. I just didn't know how to answer "why?" and couldn't seem to find it anywhere.

I suppose it could have been posted in "beyond drive'n" but I honestly never noticed what that was for until now. haha

as for any other hardware questions... I dunno :(

[The boy 4rm oz]

One your disk gets too full you can't defrag, I think it is 10 or 4%.

[b4i7]

i think last time i ran defrag it wanted 8 gigs free...

[Luke122]

If I'm not mistaken, a defrag (at least the MS defrag) needs 20% of the drive free.

The reason is that during the defrag, it's actually re-organizing the drive and shuffling data around. File A needs to be moved to blank space, so file B can go where File A was, etc.

[jdbnsn]

I know this has already been moved by the mods, but I'm trying to organize all hardware related topics to their respective regions in the hardware section. Sorry for the inconvenience.