Filling your HD

treeman

treeman

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Is there any advantage to running your machine with less on the HD?

My 1TB iMac is 75% full, so was wondering whether to dump everything off on to another External HD, (I already have other back ups) and in future just always work on the images on the ext HD and keep the iMac running with less on its HD.

Good idea or pointless? :shrug:
 
its good to not let your harddrive get too full, particularly if its been used extensively. You will end up with a lot of fragmentation which is where the files you write to drive get spalttered all over it. You can de-frag your drive which will bacisally group all the files back together and improve general performance too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation
 
Hard drives will slow down as they fill. Essentially drives will fill the nearest (and therefore fastest) sectors first and the furthest (and therefore slowest) last.

However, with modern drives and operating systems you probably won't notice a difference until it is much closer to full, say 90%+ (and even then it will come down to the way the operating system uses the drive for caching etc rather than physical read-write speeds)
 
I don't know if osx is the same but windows Defrag runs automatically in the background and works very well. At last check my laptop was 1% fragmented, so manual Defrag is pointless in that instance.
 
Just set mine to defrag on a weekly basis and got back up running on a daily basis!
 
Macs don't really need a defrag the file system is pretty efficient. Macs do come with quite stingy hard drives as standard so upgrading the drive is pretty straight forward. You can get some pretty zippy 2.5 Inch drives and will notice a performance increase as well.
 
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