How much free space to leave on hard drive

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Level 1

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How much free space to leave on hard drive

Hi. As I understand it, you should leave at least 30% of your hard drive free to allow the drive to give you optimum performance w/ the least wear and tear. And I guess 65/35 is even better. My question concerns leaving the proper percentage of free space on a drive that is partitioned. Do you treat each volume as a separate drive and leave each partition 30% free, rather than having one partition contain proportionally more free space than the other which might contain less?

Final Cut Pro 6, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Aug 15, 2012 11:53 AM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Aug 15, 2012 11:55 AM in response to stopmotion

10% of the hard drive's capacity of 20 GBs, whichever is greater.

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Answer 2

stopmotion Author

Level 1

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Aug 15, 2012 12:58 PM in response to Kappy

Thanks for your reply. So you're saying only 10% of a hard drive's total capacity or 20 GBs (whichever is greater) need be left free. That is certainly less than the 30% that I thought was the minimum.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Aug 15, 2012 3:41 PM in response to stopmotion

Yes. I don't know where you came across that 30% figure, although it may have applied when the biggest hard drives werer 100 GBs. 🙂

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Answer 4

stopmotion Author

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Aug 15, 2012 4:00 PM in response to Kappy

Okay. Well, thanks Kappy. Guess I haven't been keeping up to date on my info.

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Answer 5

Kappy

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361,731 points

Aug 15, 2012 4:04 PM in response to stopmotion

As the hard drive gets larger, the percentage needed for free space drops. Generally, 30-50 GBs of free space is sufficient most all of the time.

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Answer 6

stopmotion Author

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Aug 15, 2012 4:46 PM in response to Kappy

What kind of use would warrant the maximum amount of free space? Would video editing and digital audio recording require more free space?

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Answer 7

Kappy

Level 10

361,731 points

Aug 15, 2012 4:52 PM in response to stopmotion

It's truly hard to say. A lot of disc burning, certain OS cache and log uses, large demands on virtual memory due to lack of physical memory, all sorts ot temporary file uses. These and others might put demands on hard drive free space even if those demand are short-lived.

Certainly video and audio editing could put big demands on hard drive space, especially the latter.

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