New
#1
How full is too full for a hard drive?
When I bring up 'computer" (Windows + E) I've noticed that the bar graph showing how relatively full an external hard drive is is colored blue-green. But whenever there is less than 10 percent of the drive space free that bar turns red.
That made some sense for a drive with a few hundred gigabytes (although I don't understand the technical reasons) because I assume there needs to be a minimum amount of free space for the system to be able to do whatever manipulation of those files might be required, such as defragmenting the drive (something I've never done in decades).
However with a 4 terabyte drive the system says it is over 90 percent full when there is still over 350 gigabytes still available. That's a huge amount of space, as big as some drive C's on some computers, so I've been ignoring the red bar, but still keeping an eye on those hard drives that have it.
Does anyone have information on how much space should really be left unused on a hard drive? I hate to overfill a drive, yet also don't see the point in pulling a drive for storage with 200 or 300 gigabytes still available on it. Any advice (with sound reasons) appreciated.