Why Keep 25% Free Space On Your Hard Drive?
First, let me say up front, 25% free space is a fairly arbitrary rule of thumb. But let’s talk about the why behind it before we worry too much about the number, ok?
Keeping a good chunk of space free on your hard drive is particularly important if your computer is low on RAM (memory). You see, your computer needs elbow room to do its work, and lots of it. It wants to keep you moving, so it claims a chunk of your hard drive to use as “virtual memory”. It then writes information from RAM (memory) to disk when it’s not using that piece of information that instant, but is not ready to ‘put it away’, either, because it knows you’re still in that program and might need it again soon. So there’s a LOT of swapping of information from RAM to the hard drive and back again going on behind the scenes.
This is one reason to max out your computer’s RAM, if you can. The more RAM a computer has, the less writing to and from disk it has to do. In other words, it doesn’t have to work as hard to do what you ask of it.
If your hard drive is too full, you’ll notice your computer poking along at a snail’s pace, and may even see warning messages about being too low on virtual memory. That’s your clue it’s time to do some major house cleaning on your hard drive. Delete old programs and files you’re not using anymore, or burn them to CD or DVD, but get them off that hard drive! If you don’t keep ample free space on your hard drive, you’re creating a bottleneck you don’t need or want.
Now, about the 25% number. That’s the number I use, but you may be able to get away with less or you may need more. Bottom line, if your computer is clunking along and making you wait, freeing up space for it to use on your hard drive should improve things somewhat.
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