How full is your hard drive?

[talmy]

As my drive has filled, my performance is decreasing. I'm planning to get the 750GB WD drive. The system seems slow to me. I expected better with 8 GB of RAM. What is the typical experience? Time for an upgrade to an 7i quad core?

Thus being a good example of what Peter Norton was quoted saying.

The extra RAM (8 GB versus 4 GB) does nothing for you if you aren't actually using more than 4GB. But running a drive 80% full will hurt. Get the bigger drive, or look for large files you can part with. Moving large A/V collections to an external drive can make a big difference. And if you are being limited by the hard drive a new system with a fast processor won't help.

 

[Penn Jennings]

Thus being a good example of what Peter Norton was quoted saying.

The extra RAM (8 GB versus 4 GB) does nothing for you if you aren't actually using more than 4GB. But running a drive 80% full will hurt. Get the bigger drive, or look for large files you can part with. Moving large A/V collections to an external drive can make a big difference. And if you are being limited by the hard drive a new system with a fast processor won't help.

Can anyone please tell me WHEN Peter Norton made that comment?

I remember him being 'The Man" in 80s on MS-DOS. I remember reading books about TSR (Terminate Stay Resident) programs and how to get the most out of 640K of RAM.

I would really hate to think that we quoting comments from this era.

I would also point out, everyone has said that if you can USE the memory, extra memory will give you a huge performance boost otherwise it's does not do much.

For most apps, disk performance only affects application startup. In most cases, once your app starts, you will not see a difference in performance, unless your app performs a lot of IO while running.

I am a little concerned that people are making it sound like adding a bigger drive is going to make you system noticeable faster, because in general it won't. Adding a SSD will make you system much faster but even then only for certain operations.

 

[trip1ex]

More hard drive space won't make your system faster once you get beyond a certain swap file size. And really that's even misleading. It's more about having a certain amount of file swap space so it doesn't slow down. Not so you speed it up.

It is true larger capacity hard drives have faster transfer rates. And that's because they have a higher data density. ONe spin of a platter yields more data.

But this doesn't mean faster seek times which is what has the biggest effect on the reading/writing of small files. In other words small file read/writes probably won't be noticeably faster in higher capacity hard drives.

Folks who think their system is slowing down after filling up a good bit don't realize that it is due to all the crap that has been slowly accumulating on their system like crap they may run in the background. Not because they have less space. Unless of course they get to the point where there is virtually no room at all ie not enough for room for a proper swap file space then they may see some slow down.

At the same time if you are constantly swapping out files from memory because you don't have enough ram then that is a big system slow down operation as well.

 

[Penn Jennings]

More hard drive space won't make your system faster once you get beyond a certain file swap size.

It is true larger capacity hard drives have faster transfer rates. And that's because they have a higher data density.

But this doesn't mean faster seek times which is what has a big effect on the reading/writing of small files.

Folks who think their system is slowing down after filling up some don't realize that is due to all the crap that has been slowly accumulating on their system like crap they may run in the background. Not because they have less space.

I totally agree.

 

[nwcs]

Read that article I linked to earlier from macperforamanceguide. Drive size does make a difference in computer performance.

 

[Penn Jennings]

Read that article I linked to earlier from macperforamanceguide. Drive size does make a difference in computer performance.

True, it does.. and you would notice it in high performance applications. For the 95% of us though, you are unlikely to see significant gains by running out purchasing a new bigger drive.

You would see some gains simply because all of your data is now contiguous and if you did a reinstall you wouldn't have all of the "stuff" that we all slowly add over time.

Your article also talks about partitioning your drive and placing critical data on the outside of the drive. Thats cool if you really, really need the performance. Again, that would only be for high performance applications and now you are into what could be a very manual process. If you get anything wrong, your performance could be worse or you might have to backup all you data, repartition and reload your system. And you do all of this for maybe 40% increase in read transfer time, writes are cached.

Also remember, if you read the same data frequently, you will read it from cache in memory, not from the disk. I'm not an expert on Mac OS X memory, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong but in addition to the filesystem cache, Mac OS X also caches other stuff, the stuff that you see as inactive memory in system monitor. On my system it is currently 1.4 GB. Those are applications that were recently used that if restarted will be run from memory, not from the disk. (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1342)

So again, unless your application is very IO intensive, like encoding HD video or a very active database, a human will not notice much of a difference just because that have a larger hard drive.

In general, more memory will yield better performance gains than a a larger hard drive. Thats not always true but more often than not. If you know that you application does not have enough memory and is paging, adding more memory will always be the biggest bang for the buck.

 

[sandylp]

I had a 1TB drive in my 13" and now I have the Apple 512 SSD in my 15" 2011 mbp. I've only used 73GB and have 439GB free space. I use a separate 1TB WD Passport External drive for iTunes and iPhoto and another 1TB WD Passport drive for Time Machine.

 

[SavMBP15]

Yes, it absolutely will.

No it will absolutely not. If all I have on my computer is 100mb of data, it does not matter if I have a 250, 320, 500 or 1TB size drive. Once you go above 50% free there is very little relation to free space vs. performance.

Performance on a computer in relation to the hard drive has to do with where the data is stored (closer to the heads, quicker read times) and swap file size. Once you reach a certain point (around 50% free) the return on performance diminishes exponentially.

 

[trip1ex]

Read that article I linked to earlier from macperforamanceguide. Drive size does make a difference in computer performance.

You have to put that into perspective.

Hard drive technology is still a limiting factor. Larger drives don't increase responsiveness. You're not getting into SSD territory there.

And the article is measuring best case sustained writing speeds by writing 1 TB worth of 0s and 1s to the drives. This isn't a real world practice.

IF having much larger sized hard drives had any significant real world benefits then Apple would increase the hard drive sizes across the board.

 

[Big D 51]

131 gb available of 250 gb

 

[grahamnp]

The extra RAM (8 GB versus 4 GB) does nothing for you if you aren't actually using more than 4GB. But running a drive 80% full will hurt. Get the bigger drive, or look for large files you can part with. Moving large A/V collections to an external drive can make a big difference. And if you are being limited by the hard drive a new system with a fast processor won't help.

Yes!! Finally, somebody points this out.

Also, HDDs slow down as they fill up and they are forced to write to the outer areas and OSX dynamically allocates swap file space depending on the free space available, although this is not an issue if you have more than 30GB free.