How Full is too full

[skylinegtrv98]

well sorry if this is a newbish question...but I have an ever growing media collection, and recently I have just filled my first 1TB hard drive, and installed another 1TB drive to my computer, and I also have a 500gb primary drive.... As it stands right now I only have 9.7gbs left on my first 1tb drive, and I was wondering if there is any downside to having it that full...if by any chance it would affect the life of the drive...or if it is fine and I can actually fill it even more...or should I transfer some to my new drive.....thanks in advance for any advice

 

[hikaricloud]

Not if it isn't your primary. It's that one you should keep not full.

 

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

eegads! I don't like keeping anything mostly full that isn't backed up, but that's cause I'm paranoid.

What in Odin's name do you have that's more than 1TB total now???

 

[Lexluethar]

You'll be fine. As both above posters said you really should have your data backed up incase the drive fails AND you shouldn't use all of the space on your primary drive. Reason being is you won't be able to defrag the drive w/o at least 15% free space (i think it is around that percentage) and more than likely you page file is on that same drive so you'd run into troubles if you don't have enough room for your page file.

 

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

yeah for storage that is fine. I like to keep at least 10% free on anything if at all possible, for flexibility' sake.

If you continue adding to your collection, you ought to consider in building a RAID5 array. We just installed a new server with a 7 disk RAID5 array at 300GB per disk, so the grand total space is about 1.7 TB that is SUPER fast (installed Windows Server 2003 R2 64x in about 10 minutes) and has parity (so that if any single disk goes bad, you just replace it and the RAID controller rebuilds the info on the disk)

I wonder if you can get an external RAID array... that would be Ãœber!

EDIT
Something like this:
SAT3540ER
Startech.com InfoSafe SAT3540ER 4-Bay RAID HD Enclosure - SAT3540ER - Buy.com

 

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

You guys are nuts. Why not just stream whatever you want to watch when you want to watch it???

No point in storing it locally!

 

[skylinegtrv98]

You guys are nuts. Why not just stream whatever you want to watch when you want to watch it???

No point in storing it locally!

I dunno....I am a collector....I like having it all there at my finger tips at anytime....plus I just think it is easier to download than look for a streaming version

 

[patonb]

Because, then they know hen ypoure watching. umm, "nature" films *wink* *wink*

Plus, i only get 80G/mo

 

[veedubfreak]

Heh, my media pc has 5 750gb drives in it right now. Eventually one day i'm going to rip my entire DVD collection to it. Gotta stop putting it off. And ya, a full hard drive is fine, the only issue you will run into is trying to defrag with less than 10% open space. But on a storage drive, there really shouldnt be too much fragmentation.

 

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

still, idk - with all the lawsuits I've seen about piracy... since your ISP keeps track of all your IP connections it probably doesn't matter if you stream or DL it, they will still know. The difference is that streaming is the crime of someone else, just watching it surely cannot be illegal (at least not nearly as illegal has having the ability to redistribute it)

Of course that's probably thin ice, considering the forum rules. Anyways, it's also way easier to wipe a 50GB HDD in the event that it becomes necessary. Of course a .308 will take care of practically any sized HDD...