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what's the rule about filling up HDD's?

M

mopppish

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Hi, all.
So, I'm getting a MBP soon, and it will be my only computer.
I used to have an imac G5 and stored all of my music on it.
Now that the cheapest MBP comes with 120GB, I think I'd still like to put my itunes music on there as opposed to an external.
Before selling the imac, my itunes collection topped 60GB 😱 , however, I'm re-ripping everything at 192 AAC instead of 320, so that should be more like 40GB.
What I'm wondering is, at what point is a HDD too full?
Isn't there a percentage or something?
I don't really think that I'd hit that limit, but I figured that I should check now just in case. I work with audio, so even though I record to an external, I'll have a lot of software and samples on the drive, too.
Also, if I had a huge chunk of HDD taken up with music and then decided to move all of that music somewhere else, would that fragment the drive?
Thanks!
 
mopppish said:
Hi, all.
So, I'm getting a MBP soon, and it will be my only computer.
I used to have an imac G5 and stored all of my music on it.
Now that the cheapest MBP comes with 120GB, I think I'd still like to put my itunes music on there as opposed to an external.
Before selling the imac, my itunes collection topped 60GB 😱 , however, I'm re-ripping everything at 192 AAC instead of 320, so that should be more like 40GB.
What I'm wondering is, at what point is a HDD too full?
Isn't there a percentage or something?
I don't really think that I'd hit that limit, but I figured that I should check now just in case. I work with audio, so even though I record to an external, I'll have a lot of software and samples on the drive, too.
Also, if I had a huge chunk of HDD taken up with music and then decided to move all of that music somewhere else, would that fragment the drive?
Thanks!
Click to expand...

The last four or five gigabytes of your hard drive should be used for paging, thereby, I wouldn't use those last four gigabytes. I think you should at least back up your iTunes folder to an external drive, forgive any types I don't have my contacts in....Also remember that 120GB formatted out is going to be raound 113, 114 GB (the actual hard drive capacity). So occupying 40-60 GB should be fine. 🙂
 
Yeah, I have a Lacie drive that's essentially going to serve as a backup for both my itunes and my recording projects.
The Lacie is 250GB and the recording drive (one I built) is 320GB, but there's only 100GB on it right now, and I don't intend to keep all of it.
With the MBP, I'll finally have a way to use the FW800 on the Lacie. 🙂
 
The general rule is to keep ~10-15% of the total formatted capacity free, for OS X's virtual memory and caching.....this helps performance and reduces fragmentation also. However, it is HIGHLY recommended to keep all audio/video/imaging working files on a drive seperate from the boot drive, but you seem to already have that under control 😀

And yes, frequesntly moving (larger) files around usually results in at least some fragging, but that is easily solved by copying everything to another drive, reformatting the storage drive, and then copying everything back.
 
page file

this brings up a good question; durring the reinstall is it possible to have a seperate partition for the page file like Linux does? at my work we run a whole seperate drive for swap space (Windows)...

DD
 
SmurfBoxMasta said:
The general rule is to keep ~10-15% of the total formatted capacity free, for OS X's virtual memory and caching.....this helps performance and reduces fragmentation also. However, it is HIGHLY recommended to keep all audio/video/imaging working files on a drive seperate from the boot drive, but you seem to already have that under control 😀

And yes, frequesntly moving (larger) files around usually results in at least some fragging, but that is easily solved by copying everything to another drive, reformatting the storage drive, and then copying everything back.
Click to expand...

I don't think this general rule translates from the days when 20-40 Gb hard drives were standard to now, when 150Gb+ are common. The amount of hard drive space required for VM paging has not increased proportionally, if at all. Also, OSX defragments the drive on the fly, so I believe the advice to reformat it to cure fragmentation is a bit extreme.
 
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