Hard Drive Affecting Game Performance

[dhlk1]

I have a 465gb HDD (advertised as 500gb, but my PC only reads 465) and it is getting pretty full. I have about 80gb left, and recently I started to see some changes in performance in my steam games. I have about 23 games on it, and most of them are pretty big games such as BF4, Far Cry 4, DayZ, Tomb Raider, Planetside 2, Skyrim and so on. I just wanted to know if my hard drive can affect my performance in my games when it is almost full, like I'm talking about stuttering and FPS drops. Also, when I try to download updates or games, it would say "Busy writing to disk" almost every 5 minutes. I have about 2 years of experience with computers, and I'm still learning. Anyways, it would be nice to know what is going on here, I would appreciate it.

My specs:
ZOTAC GTX 970 4GB
I5 4430
MSI B85M-G43
8GB RAM
500w Corsair PSU

 

[HEXiT]

you never want to fill a hdd. typically your best leaving 10% aside for drive operations. that way the performance drop off would be minimal.
you also need to keep on top of fragmentation. anything over 15% you should be looking at defragging.
auslogics defrag and defraggler are 2 of the best free 1s.
for defragging you will need that 10% i mentioned earlier

 

[dhlk1]

you never want to fill a hdd. typically your best leaving 10% aside for drive operations. that way the performance drop off would be minimal.
you also need to keep on top of fragmentation. anything over 15% you should be looking at defragging.
auslogics defrag and defraggler are 2 of the best free 1s.
for defragging you will need that 10% i mentioned earlier

Thank you for the reply, but would you say that 80gb left on a 465gb would be enough? Or should I clean some stuff out?

 

[V1ctor89]

You can only access 465 Gb because the hdd manufacturers calculate the size as multiple of 1000 and not 1024 as it should be. So if you calculate 500.000.000.000 / 1024 = 465.661. All ok. As for the performance drop: windows indexes only the system partition so you will only have to make sure that C:\ doesn't get too low on space.

You can use CCleaner to free up some space and a defragmenting software to freshen it up a bit.

 

[HEXiT]

you never want to fill a hdd. typically your best leaving 10% aside for drive operations. that way the performance drop off would be minimal.
you also need to keep on top of fragmentation. anything over 15% you should be looking at defragging.
auslogics defrag and defraggler are 2 of the best free 1s.
for defragging you will need that 10% i mentioned earlier

Thank you for the reply, but would you say that 80gb left on a 465gb would be enough? Or should I clean some stuff out?

depends how quickly you fill it. if like me you download a lot of random stuff (typical month is about 400gig) then yes delete what you dont need or move it to another storage medium like dvd's