GB to Leave Free on a 2TB Hard Drive?

Danielzxzx · 17 May 2014

I have seen this type of question answered many times from googling but I found different answers with some saying a percentage while others give an exact number. I also don't know if having a big hard drive affects how much space I should leave free and all the topics I could find were from people who never said how big their's was or had a small hard drive.

So as of now my 2TB hard drive has 157GB of space left. I want to be able to get the most out of the hard drive since I have to wait till September to be able to upgrade. However I also want to make sure I don't use too much that it start to affect the performance.

How much GB should I leave free?

ignatzatsonic · 17 May 2014

As you say, you get varying opinions depending on where you look.

I'd say just use the thing. That's what it's for. At some point, the deterioration in performance may become obvious and you will have answered your own question authoritatively. Until that happens, it's just speculation.

When it happens, evaluate how serious the slowdown is and consider shopping. You may not notice any deterioration before September.

I'm in a somewhat similar situation with a 1.5 TB drive. I want to buy a 3 TB replacement, but don't want to pay over 99.99 for it. I'm trying to hold out till at least the end of this year. I have not had any performance issues yet.

badger906 · 17 May 2014

fill it, thats what its there for.

when I first got a tiny ssd when they first came out I was often left with less than 10gb of free space.
the way I look at it, if you buy a 2tb drive and people suggest you leave say 100gb free then its actually a 1.9tb lol I know thats a slightly nieve view buuut thats just me

Lady Fitzgerald · 17 May 2014

The figures I see bandied about most frequently for HDDs is you should leave 10-15% unused space on a HDD to facilitate defragmentation. That figure increases to 20-25% for SSDs, for wear leveling, TRIM, etc. (SSDs should never be defragged).

For a 2TB HDD, that would be roughly 18-28GB should be left unused. Can you fill up a HDD? Sure you can but you most likely will hamper performance; how much would depend on a large variety of factors. If you just dump data on to the HDD and never delete any of it, you can probably get away with filling the HDD to the brim without a problem. You frequently delete data and add more, then filling an HDD until defragmentation can no longer be done will most likely cause a performance hit.