Vista - How full can my hard drive be?

Okay, I am about to set up my new HP computer which has Vista Premium
64 bit and a 750 gig hard drive.

With all the mp3's, lossless audio and avi's I have on various
external hard drives, 750 gigs isn't really "that big" anymore!

So I was on the phone with a friend last night and he said "I have to
delete a bunch of stuff from my hard drive because my computer geek
friend told me I should never have my drive more than 50% full."

I said, "Well, surely nowadays with big hard drives that is no longer
true. But I will ask."

So:
How full can a 750gig hard drive be, before it causes sluggishness or
other problems, using Vista Premium 64bit?

Note: I am thinking of shrinking the C partition into various
partitions:
about 20gigs for a cd/dvd ripping area
about 100gigs for Vista and programs and desktop working area" (C
drive)
about 400 gigs for mp3's
and the rest for .avi movie files

Is this a reasonable plan?
And is it okay to shrink it and divide it after I'm already up and
running with Vista, internet, etc.?

Thanks for the info!

"JuanAdams" <jimsocal@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8ccc579a-10ce-4b49-81bf-e1dcd0e84b94@xxxxxx
Not true. At least not to the degree being stated, its a good idea to give
Windows a bit of space for when it installs patches and updates, and to make
sure there's room for System Restore and the like.
15%-20% is fine. I've been running mine with about 2% free, (about 10GB)
for a couple of months now, granted I only have a few System Restore points
now, but its working fine.

There is a performance impact as a drive gets full, this is because it takes
longer to access the outside of a platter than the inside (because of the
rotation speed), in benchmarks it can be half the speed of the beginning of
the drive, but Windows typically will be physically positioned near the
beginning of the drive anyway, and being a bit slow accessing music or
videos won't have any impact. This isn't something an end-user would notice
without having tools to actually test the drive.

Partitioning the drives wouldn't change performance factor at all. It may
enable you to have a greater percentage of free space on the system
partition, but I'm doubtful if its worth it considering the situation you
could come across later on wishing you had a few more gigabytes for your MP3
partition, and so having to spread it around different partitions for
example. (The built in partitioning tools cannot always shrink a partition,
usually because there's data that cannot be physically moved being in the
way).

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
Microsoft MVP Windows Desktop Experience.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/

JuanAdams wrote:20% free is good - after 15% things really do start to slow down.

HDDs are so cheap at the moment - add a big second drive and move all
your downloads and media to it.

Guy

On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:45:41 -0000, "Paul Smith"
<paul@xxxxxx> wrote:
The end user will notice the reduction in performance as the drive
thrashes about when close to full. Rattle, rattle, rattle, wait, wait,
wait.

Your drive is going toast......
But that depends on how full and how slow, the manufacturer (ie; how cheap),,,
you need to leave atleast 20% free space for proper defragging

never going over 50% free space is a bit on the rediculous side if you ask me.

With that said......

SSD drives will not suffer these problems.

On Mar 27, 4:37*pm, Tepid <gu...@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote:What's an SSD drive?

JuanAdams <jimsocal@xxxxxx> wrote:
GOT GOOGLE??

On Mar 28, 2:29*pm, Mike Torello <torel...@xxxxxx> wrote:No.
Got patience?

On Mar 28, 2:29*pm, Mike Torello <torel...@xxxxxx> wrote:I do have Google, after all.
For those who may not want to go looking it up, I found the following
info at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

"A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-
state memory to store persistent data. An SSD emulates a hard disk
drive interface, thus easily replacing it in most applications. An SSD
using SRAM or DRAM (instead of flash memory) is often called a RAM-
drive.

The original usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics)
refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes,
but in this context, has been adopted to distinguish solid-state
electronics from electromechanical devices as well. With no moving
parts, solid-state drives are less fragile than hard disks and are
also silent (unless a cooling fan is used); as there are no mechanical
delays, they usually employ low access time and latency.

SSDs have begun to appear in laptops,[1][2] although as of 2009 they
are substantially more expensive per unit of capacity than hard drives
(US$500 for a 256 GB SSD, vs. US$50 for a similar size external USB HDD
[3])."

me:
Sounds like a good deal if and when they come down in price. Right now
they're maybe a good deal, anyway if you consider that they are less
likely (IF they indeed are less likely?) to die within a year or two
as most USB External Hard drives seem to do.