Mark Knecht wrote: > > > On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 2:16 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com > <mailto:rdalek1...@gmail.com>> wrote: > > > > <SNIP> > > > > Hard to believe no one has more up to date info on what is safe given > > drives are so large now and file system improvements. I'd think having > > a TB or two would be plenty, regardless of percentage, but not real > > sure. Don't want to risk data testing the theory either. > > > > Update: The new drive came in. It passed all the tests and is online. > > dfc looks like this now for Data. > > > > OK, I hate to even try to answer this, and first, I have no storage design > experience but I suspect it depends a lot on YOUR usage. I see Rich > provided an answer while I was writing this so you'll want to follow any > advice he might have given. He's smart. I'm not. > > My guess is that while you 'store' a lot of data you don't actually > 'change' > a lot of data. For instance, in the past, you seemed to be download > YouTube > videos. If you've saved them, never to watch them or change them, then > other than protecting yourself from losing them, they go onto the disk and > never move. If that's your usage model I don't know why you can't go > right up to 100% minus just a little. (Say 10x the size of your > average file) > After all, you could always remove a few files to temp storage, optimize > the disk and then re-add the files. > > On the other hand, if you're deleting files in the middle of the drive > I could > see cases where new files get fragmented and stuff you put on late in > life gets strewn around the drive which doesn't sound great. > > In a completely different usage case, like you're running a bunch of > databases > that are filling your drive, removing old records, adding new records > all the > time, then depending on how your disk optimizations run you might need > a huge amount of space to gather the databases back together. However > even in that case you could move a complete database to a temp location, > optimize the drive and then re-add the database. > > So, as is often the case, in my mind...IT DEPENDS! ;-) > > Best wishes, > Mark
This is sort of my thinking as well. I do update/delete/move files on occasion but it is usually done in small chunks and mostly by hand. I use ext4 and given the slow speed of this, I'm sure the file system has more than enough time to rearrange things. I have in the past ran the ext defrag tool. It usually reports back a low score, usually 0. Most files that are fragmented are really small and usually only 4 or 5 of them. I still plan to expand before reaching 90%. Thing is, something could happen that makes me have to wait. I was just curious as to how long I could wait. If going past a certain point would/could cause data problems, I wanted to know what that limit was. Now to see what Rich thinks. I bet he has some ideas. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
