If this is just a data drive I don't think there is any space restriction. You need space on your boot drive because OSX is constantly creating files used in running your computer and if it gets cramped it misbehaves. I have 160 GB archive data drives with only a few hundred MB left on them. You do need to leave enough so a few invisible files can be written to them.
If this is just a data drive I don't think there is any space restriction. You need space on your boot drive because OSX is constantly creating files used in running your computer and if it gets cramped it misbehaves. I have 160 GB archive data drives with only a few hundred MB left on them. You do need to leave enough so a few invisible files can be written to them.
Contrary to the idea of data drives don't matter how low, it does, and rule of thumb is about 10%. HFS+ has to keep track of all the files and file fragments and room for the directory.
Plus, a drive just needs some free space that isn't highly fragmented which gets harder to achieve.
Performance, because it suffers as you fill a drive, longer seeks, finding files and where to place updates.
10% would be almost 200GB which may seem extreme.
Depends on how or type of data, whether editing video or just for archive.
I'd look at off-loading 400GB.
And for system, 40% free, and unfragmented space helps for burning DVDs and other projects. Most people also want to use fastest drive, and to get the best performance out of the drive.
There is no workable quote system for HFS+, something it probably needs.
I think even here we need to distinguish between a data drive and a storage drive (which the OP says this is). I have storage/archive drives for backup copies of things that never change (CDs, photos, tax record scans, etc.). Technically there shouldn't be any fragmentation since files are only created and sequentially fill up the drive. Probably there's a tiny amount, but since I don't use the drive for anything other than data transfer on and off my real data drive for playing/viewing on I am not concerned about performance. I leave some room for the directory but have several drives I have taken down to a couple of hundred MB free I have used this way for 8 years with no issues.
I agree if you're seriously regularly using the drive for writes and re-writes then you have a fragmentation issue. I still doubt you need 400GB free. The size of drives has increased faster than the files we put on them except for high-end video production. If that 1TB drive is full of 5MB MP3s then the fragmentation will be minimal, but 25 years ago 5MB was 50% of my whole hard drive! For that matter 400GB is double all the space I have on my present 2 internal hard drives even before putting on anything.
One thing I would recommend though is that this not be the only copy of the files on that drive. People are buying huge drives for their expensive media collections but the really huge drives are still pretty high on the failure rate list. People just get one drive and there's a good chance it might die, taking with it several hundred dollars of media as well as irreplaceable photos, etc.
Well, my take on it is if you truly just use it for storage you have more than enough (I have some drives that have less total space than you have free on that one). I know The Hatter had a different take...
