[SOLVED] Do I need to leave space on drive's ?

[editor1]

Hi

What space do I need to leave free on system drive?, NAS drives and dynamic compiled hdd that make one drive ? SSD and HDD.

I have;
465 GB SSD that has windows 10 on it.
1.8 TB HDD and 3 232 GB HDD as dynamic drive (D on my tower/windows 10. (some are 8 years old)
2.7 TB HDD and 232 GB HDD on my NAS.

What space do I need to leave free on system SSD and/or HDD ?
What space do I need to leave free for defraging HDD ?
And do I need to leave any space on NAS's SSD and/or HDD ?

The combined dynamic drive of 1.8 and the 232 drive's is the one that stumps me. Is it like partitions wear you have to total a percentage from each drive ?

[Title moved to main text area as it was way too long --- Moderator]

 

[mdd1963]

Most folks like to have SSDs with OS installed having at least 20-25% of space remaining, and, having less than 10% available is reported to start giving performance hits....

SSDs should not be defragged.....

8 year old spinning hard drives MIGHT be fun to play with, and might work for another 8 years, but, it might also be wise to start searching for some new 4 TB storage drives at ~$120 or so....(or a pair of 2 TB drives to minimize risk of loss of data)

Valuable, priceless data (wedding photos, photos of kids, great-grandmothers, etc., ) can be encrypted and stored in the cloud, for which there are numerous free cloud storage services... (OneDrive, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, P-Cloud, Box, Jottacloud, etc)

 

[USAFRet]

On the SSD, about 15-20%.
Basically, don't go over 400GB consumed space for your drive.

 

[editor1]

Valuable, priceless data (wedding photos, photos of kids, great-grandmothers, etc., ) can be encrypted and stored in the cloud, for which there are numerous free cloud storage services... (OneDrive, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, P-Cloud, Box, Jottacloud, etc)

Ty. I'l look in to see how much I can store on the cloud.

On the SSD, about 15-20%.
Basically, don't go over 400GB consumed space for your drive.

Ether of you have any idea on what to do about the other drives ?

 

[USAFRet]

Ether of you have any idea on what to do about the other drives ?

What other drives?

An SSD, no matter how you use it, needs about 15-20% free space.

 

[editor1]

What other drives?

An SSD, no matter how you use it, needs about 15-20% free space.

my NAS HDD and 1.8 TB HDD and 3 232 GB HDD as one dynamic drive D on my tower/windows 10.

 

[USAFRet]

A mostly full HDD will get fragmented quite quickly. It will scramble to find free space to save <whatever>.
Won't impact performance or lifespan as much as a mostly ful SSD.

 

[editor1]

A mostly full HDD will get fragmented quite quickly. It will scramble to find free space to save <whatever>.
Won't impact performance or lifespan as much as a mostly ful SSD.

ok.. ty

 

[ElectrO_90]

Run Hard Disk Sentinel to see how much life is left in your aging hard disks - its a very handy tool

 

[cryoburner]

If hard disk drives are just used for bulk data storage (video, photos, backups, etc), you probably don't have to worry too much about overfilling them. Even if they only have around a gigabyte free, it's likely not going to matter all that much. You might not be able to defragment them thoroughly, but unless you are constantly deleting small files from the drive and adding new ones, a moderate amount of fragmentation isn't likely to be a significant performance concern for such data files anyway.

Now, if there is an operating system, applications or games stored to a hard drive, then you should leave some more free space on the partition to handle defragmentation, as files will be more likely to get fragmented through updates and temporary files, and that fragmentation will be more likely to effect performance.

And as was said, on many SSDs, low free space can cause a significant reduction in performance, so you should ideally leave more space free on those drives.

I agree about making sure anything important is backed up too. As for using utilities to check drive health though, they can potentially give a heads up if a drive is failing, but drives may also fail without giving any signs beforehand. And the age of a drive isn't necessarily all that relevant. Some drives will fail within months, while others will last well over a decade. Even if a drive is brand new, it shouldn't be trusted with irreplaceable data that isn't backed up elsewhere.

As for having a bunch of small drives combined to a single dynamic volume, I would avoid that, if possible. As I understand it, if any one of those drives fail, you lose the entire volume, so you are significantly increasing your chances of losing more data compared to keeping each drive as its own separate partition.