Are full Data disks an issue?

wormvortex

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It's well known that a full system disk is bad for business and can cause all sorts of issues but does it matter if my storage disks are full? My O/S is on an SSD with plenty of space but I then have several standard large HDD's some of which have 1/2% space free. Does this matter or can I freely fill these disks to full with no issue.

I only ask because I'm noticing at times 1 of the disks has 100% uterlisation and when this happens I cannot stream a video from it without constant buffering. I can't even work out what's causing the huge spike in usage and if I reboot the system it drops right down to normal and everything is fine.
 
In my experience I cant say I encountered any issue with near 90-95% usage of a storage HDD, I'd be more inclined to suspect something is wrong the disk in question or there is a connection issue if using USB.

Try installing HD sentinel trial and see what it reports on the health status of the drive.
 
I'll download it and see what it reports. The disk hasn't thrown up anything on SMART so far but obviously that is foolproof
 
Most Hard Disk Drives are fine getting full but once you get to about 95% you would be wise to start looking to replace or upgrade.

The fuller they get is the more work they will do to write and read files that don't occupy contiguous space on the disk and this work load generally increases as the disk fills. Essentially your disk filling limits the optimal options it has to write data easily and consequently reading back these files can become work intensive for the drive. Defragmenting the drive can certainly help, and there are a lot 3rd party of products that do this, and Windows does have this feature built in. There are some disks that even have this intrinsic function to some degree.

The slow read doesn't mean your drive is necessarily bad, but it can mean that the drive is having problems retrieving data. A SMART test is always a good idea to test the health of a drive and as mentioned above, many tools can help identify an issue.

Generally larger files will be more inclined to cause problems for obvious reasons. If you have a video file that you stored on the disk in its early days (or certainly long before it was full) and this streams fine compared to a recently written file, this is a sure sign that space is causing you an issue.
 

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