Well on working drives you start to get a system slowdown at about 66% full and it gets pretty serious at 80%. However on an archive drive you can probably stuff them up to 90-95%.
The reason a working drive needs the extra space is that it needs fairly large segments of the drive available for temporary files. And since it is constantly writing and erasing files it gets fragmented quit quickly if it does not have a lot of spare space. On your archive drives, I would suggest doing a defrag if you erase a bunch of files before adding new ones. Other than that you can pretty much pack them up. -graywolf Mark Cassino wrote: > I've got a real 'get it done' mindset on moving my digital photos from > DVD's and CD's to external hard drives. Unfortunately, my math seems to > have been off on how many of these external drives I'd need... > > Aside from the real vs nominal storage capacity issue, which I should > have anticipated, (the 500 gb drives I bought actually store 460 gb of > data)- as I close in on packing my first drive full I realize that hard > drives need some empty space to function properly. > > So the 500 gig drive only hold 460, and the 460 gig drive can't really > be filled up to 460 gigs... > > How much empty space does a hard drive need to work properly? I've seen > articles on the web that say a drive should not be filled beyond 80% of > capacity - wow, that would be a huge bite out of the storage space. > > I'm loading up the drives with what I consider to be static data. If I > re-work an image my scheme for organizing files calls for rolling the > new version forward onto a new drive (or at least a new directory.) So > once a drive is loaded with images, it should not change. I'm thinking > (hoping) the 80% rule may pertain more to drives used dynamically, new > data coming and going, and not for just archiving data. > > I knew that you should not load drives to 100%, but I was planning on > leaving only about 10 gigs free on each drive. Is that reasonable? If > not - how much free space is needed? > > Thanks - > > MCC -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
