[SOLVED] should i leave 10% or 20 % Free Space ?

[lilian242ra]

I have 3 4tb Western Digital Hard Drives For my Plex Server
should I leave 800 Gb Free Space or 400 Gb which is 10 enough ?
to Keep the drive at full Performance and Not to Reduce it's Lifespan .

 

[Alabalcho]

The hard drive itself does not know how full it is, this is OS and Filesystem function. So, to answer your question - what OS, and what file systems will be used with these drives?

 

[lilian242ra]

The hard drive itself does not know how full it is, this is OS and Filesystem function. So, to answer your question - what OS, and what file systems will be used with these drives?

Windows 10 and ntfs file system the OS is on my SSD and the media on my red drives No Raid .

 

[Alabalcho]

If the drive is mostly read-only (as would be the storage for your media server), you can keep free space pretty low. For your system drive, I'd keep 15-20% free.

Again - the physical drive itself does not have knowledge about "free space" (with the exception of SSDs and their TRIM function), so "lifespan" would not depend on how much free space you keep there.

 

[popatim]

It's on a server so assuming that you'd be accessing the data over the network you are limited by the network speed, not the drive. Feel free to fill it up imo. Depending on which WD it is, you may only be at about 80MB/s at the very end of the drive and the transfer rate of a gigabit lan is about 110MB/s.

Still your video won't even need all that speed to stream it.

 

[Jason H.]

I have 3 4tb Western Digital Hard Drives For my Plex Server
should I leave 800 Gb Free Space or 400 Gb which is 10 enough ?
to Keep the drive at full Performance and Not to Reduce it's Lifespan .

Free space on HDD's isnt as big of a deal as free space on a SSD.

You can keep your free space pretty low for a HDD but a SSD will start to drop performance once it gets lower than 50% free.

 

[CountMike]

Only system drives need free space, others not so much. Even couple of % is enough for auto defrag to work.