How low can FREE SPACE go on 2TB Data HDD

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Age old question – How much remaining “Free Space” should one leave on a drive. We have all asked the question and have found numinous answers. For myself, my “System drive”, I prefer to have at 50 percent, at times allowed to get to 30 percent .. many suggest 20 percent is the magic number. Additionally keep a current “Image Backup” of this drive (biweekly), plus dynamic info (email, DOC, ect) 3 times daily (on drive 2- Data Internal Drive). I will leave that discussion for another time.

My question is my 3rd drive, a 2TB (formatted to 1.81TB – Movie Data only), which is 12.8 percent remaining space. .. but that value is 232GB. It has a large collection of family movies and DVD’s stored on it. Now 232GB is a lot of free space, but 12.8 percent “Remaining Space” is a small number. What suggestions / technical reviews / experiences have you folks had in managing this question. How low can “Free Space” go and SAFELY maintain this data on today’s very large drives??

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IMHO, free space is only really critical on the primary OS drive. If the third drive is really only storing movies and not running any applications, then it can be full to the brim and it wouldn’t matter. However, Win 7 won’t like it and will keep flagging up disk space critical when it gets down to 10%.

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I’m currently at 39% free on my 2TB drive.

I agree with TerFar, if all you store on it are movies you should be able to get it well into the 10 percent range without issue.
I would take extra steps as well to ensure that the operating system does not have any hooks on the drive. Exclude indexing and system restore.
Windows explorer may take a little longer bringing it up upon first session access, but well worth the wait.

Defragmenting in this instance would rarely be needed, if at all.

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Thanks for the input guys, most appreciated. Once I get to 90 per cent capacity, will remove drive and install in an external. Will mount a new 2TB drive in puter and restart the process.

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We have all asked the question and have found numinous answers.

Unusual use of the word numinous.
adjective, having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity:

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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We have all asked the question and have found numinous answers.

Unusual use of the word numinous.
adjective, having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity:

🙂 A phrase with more than one meaning. 🙂
Most of us offer and/or accept suggestions cheerfully. Some folks express a much “higher revelation” in their suggestions / experiences. It’s what makes the world go-around … enjoy the ride. 😮

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BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Seems to be quoting correct numbers as 232GB is actually 12.8 % of 1.81TB

Age old question – How much remaining “Free Space” should one leave on a drive. We have all asked the question and have found numinous answers. For myself, my “System drive”, I prefer to have at 50 percent, at times allowed to get to 30 percent .. many suggest 20 percent is the magic number. Additionally keep a current “Image Backup” of this drive (biweekly), plus dynamic info (email, DOC, ect) 3 times daily (on drive 2- Data Internal Drive). I will leave that discussion for another time.

My question is my 3rd drive, a 2TB (formatted to 1.81TB – Movie Data only), which is 12.8 percent remaining space. .. but that value is 232GB. It has a large collection of family movies and DVD’s stored on it. Now 232GB is a lot of free space, but 12.8 percent “Remaining Space” is a small number. What suggestions / technical reviews / experiences have you folks had in managing this question. How low can “Free Space” go and SAFELY maintain this data on today’s very large drives??

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Seems to be quoting correct numbers as 232GB is actually 12.8 % of 1.81TB

The above storage values are views displayed in “My Computer”.
For all the MS bashers … See MS can get things right! 😉

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I’d say figure out what the largest file on the drive is and figure a bit more space than that so that if you do defragment your drive it will work guaranteed (I’m assuming that most of the free space listed is contiguous thus the largest file which is probably fragmented would then be movable to this contiguous free space thus making the necessary space to move the other files around). If you can leave your hard drive attached to a computer for a very (very) long time I’d suggest trying to defragment and optimize it (I use MyDefrag). It will take a very long time (My old 1TB 5400RPM took more than 48 hours to defragment but, recovered more than 30GB). If you only add files and never delete them (including overwrites) then you probably don’t have a lot of fragmentation thus the free space available is about all you’ll get.

MyDefrag: Uses the Windows Defrag API to defrag and optimize data on a disk.
Defrag: The process of making files on a drive contiguous thus limiting the number of read/write cycles needed when using the file.
Optimize: The process of moving files on a drive to a more suitable position. For example moving the most used files to the fastest part of the disk.

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