Is this true?

[legend8887]

Can a hard drive slow down as you put more and more stuff on it such as large games? 

[NuraXx]

hell no

[Izaya Orihara]

Yes this is correct. 

[TheNinjaNextDor]

No. Though I've heard that it can slow down the very small amounts of space left.

[DoubleY]

From what I've heard, as it gets close to full (like 1 or 2GB free) it starts to get slower. 

[Atlantisman]

Yes, it can, particularly when it his around 20% capacity remaining it will start to slow down.

[hojnikb]

HDDs can get quite slow when full (because then data is on the inner side of plate, which is much slower). This is especially apperent when drive is near full (1-2GB left) and data is heavily fragmated.

 

SSDs are different here but some can be slower when full, others perform like normal.

[MG2R]

@legend8887 This will be a bit of a wall of text, but I'd

like to explain in full detail what's going on inside your

HDD.

 

A hard drive is basically a fast moving metal platter

coated with a magnetic layer. A read/write head floats

above this platter at micrometers from the surface.

The head can move and sense the change in

magnetic field (this is the actual data) or change the

magnetic orientation of a small piece on the disk,

thereby changing the data on the disk.

 

When you read a bit of data off of the disk, the head

needs to move to the correct location. This involves

rotating towards the correct track (an imaginative circle

on the platter) and waiting for the platter to spin until

the requested bit of data is directly beneath the head,

at which point it can be read.

 

You can see that this can take quite a bit of time. This

is the reason hard drives are so bad at random

acces. The heads can't move instantly from one

location to another.

 

Hard drives are reasonably fast at sequential

reads and writes, because the head doesn't

need to change its position a lot (it just needs

to change one track at a time,when the current

track is full).

 

When you write a giant file to an empty drive, it will

be written sequentially. Because of that it can be

read sequentially (thus, fast) as well. Even if you fill up

your drive this way, the data will still be able to be read

sequentially, and thus at high speed.

 

If you fill your hard drive over time with files of varying

sizes, some of which get deleted and replaced by others,

the operating system will try to find a large enough

consistent area to write the files to.  Howerever, as your

disk gets more and more filled up, the empty spaces get

smaller and smaller. This continues up until a point where

you have a file that is too big to fit entirely in any of the

free spaces.

 

In such an event, the file will be split in multiple smaller

parts, also called fragments (hence the term frag-

mentation). You can do this until your drive is

completely full. When you try to read that fragmented

file, the heads in your drive will have to move from one

track to another in order to get all the parts that make

up the file you requested. This process will make the

reads and writes slow

 

Even when your file system is fragmented, though,

your drive will still be able to read files that are

unfragmented at full sequential speed, because the

heads don't need to move much to get all the parts of

the file (they are all in one place).

 

TL;DR (conclusion)

Yes, when your drive is nearly full, it's possible that

you will notice a performance drop. This will only occur

if there is actual fragmentation. Since most users don't

use their hard drives for archiving large files that fill up

the entire drive, fragmentation is highly likely on nearly

filled filesystems, that is why the statement in the OP is

so widely spread.

[IdeaStormer]

I find that when I store files of heavy images like trucks or huge rocks the disk gets lopsided

 

Yea, well fragmentation is not really the hard drives problem, its the freaking filesystem's responsibility to not fragment the freaking data, so move to ext4 or another filesystem that takes care of this and your drive won't get lopsided and then fall over :lol: .

 

Really man, NTFS basically sucks balls...

[DarthSlater77]

Can a hard drive slow down as you put more and more stuff on it such as large game

The drive dosent slow down but it can become unorginised, imigine looking for each volume of the world encylopedia scaterd throughout difrent shelves in the whole library. Dfrag your HDD and the library will become orgnised again ant the time it take you to get the serise of books, filse that make up Skyrim =), gets much shorter, AKA shorter acess time. Im dislexic so spelling police dot bother waising your time.

[One Who Craves Souls]

I currently have 48.3mb of free space, on my 1tb HD... don't notice any difference. I'm always checking for fragmentation and cleaning it up thou.

 

Had 2-3mb last week... lol

[Ahnzh]

well I noticed my pc slowing down. that was when 250GB HDDs were top of the table. like 8 years ago. never really ran into problems like no HDD space. Was buying new, large HDDs/SSDs/NAS/DAS/Sticks far too often to run into problems after that. And to be honest back then it just was when i was on a LAN party getting home with the whole HDD full of pr0n.

[MG2R]

I find that when I store files of heavy images like trucks or huge rocks the disk gets lopsided

 

Yea, well fragmentation is not really the hard drives problem, its the freaking filesystem's responsibility to not fragment the freaking data, so move to ext4 or another filesystem that takes care of this and your drive won't get lopsided and then fall over :lol: .

 

Really man, NTFS basically sucks balls...

Well, even ext4 will have to fragment at some point.

[alpenwasser]

I find that when I store files of heavy images like trucks or huge rocks the disk gets lopsided

 

Yea, well fragmentation is not really the hard drives problem, its the freaking filesystem's responsibility to not fragment the freaking data, so move to ext4 or another filesystem that takes care of this and your drive won't get lopsided and then fall over :lol: .

 

Really man, NTFS basically sucks balls...

Yeah, I usually apply a counterweight to my disks once they start getting

very full to help them stay balanced.

But yeah, a good filesystem can help AFAIK.

 

Well, even ext4 will have to fragment at some point.

I've never really looked into ext4's fragmentation properties, but I do

recall reading that ZFS has the issue and therefore ZFS docs recommend

about 20% free space in your pool. Although personally I only really

noticed a stark performance drop once free space fell down way below

that.

[ViruZ_HUN]

hell no

 

Yes this is correct. 

 

 

all other answers a like this, yes, no,yes,no,yes no...

 

 

so i answer this thread

 

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

No

yes

No

No

Yes

No

yes

No

YesYes

NoNONONO way.

Yes way.!!

[ViruZ_HUN]

I currently have 48.3mb of free space, on my 1tb HD... don't notice any difference. I'm always checking for fragmentation and cleaning it up thou.

 

Had 2-3mb last week... lol

LOL

[IdeaStormer]

Well, even ext4 will have to fragment at some point.

 

Exactly, at some point not on day one.

 

Yeah, I usually apply a counterweight to my disks once they start getting

very full to help them stay balanced.

But yeah, a good filesystem can help AFAIK.

 

I've never really looked into ext4's fragmentation properties, but I do

recall reading that ZFS has the issue and therefore ZFS docs recommend

about 20% free space in your pool. Although personally I only really

noticed a stark performance drop once free space fell down way below

that.

 

ZFS needs space for other house keeping chores, not just to prevent fragmentation.

[IdeaStormer]

Can a hard drive slow down as you put more and more stuff on it such as large games? 

 

Your question can be interpreted in two ways.

 

1. The spindle speed will not slow down due to adding more data, no matter what the data is.

2. Much like your personal filing system of any paper files at home, the time it takes to find them is dependent on the file system used (aka NTFS, ext4, FAT32, etc.) and the activity on your I/O Bus while looking for those files.

 

Since you mentioned gaming, yea you have NTFS so yea its going to slow down due to NTFS sucking at keeping things synchronized or together, as in files in a continuous block. You can invest in a 3rd party defragmentation software to keep the fragmentation down but again you're using NTFS so it will continue to fragment your drive, the OS has its own defrag. program and should be scheduled to run at set intervals to keep it defrag-ed but I take the default program with a grain a of salt. Sure it helps but I doubt it takes into account the different file types and their use as it never lists where those files are. In  a nutshell everyone has pretty much given up on defrag-ing their computers with 3rd party software as the move to SSD's has made it fast so we live with the NTFS deficiencies but some of us were hoping for a new file system with Windows 7, then Windows 8 but have yet to see this ancient file system improved in any way. Yeah Microsoft <_<

[alpenwasser]

ZFS needs space for other house keeping chores, not just to prevent fragmentation.

I'm honestly not that familiar with its inner workings, since I haven't

delved into that too deeply yet (I'm primarily familiar with what one

needs to know as an end user for deploying ZFS on small servers/NAS boxes

like I've been using it), but fragmentation seems to be the usual reason

given in the docs I've read. But yes, from the resources I've gone

through, there is indeed quite a lot going on in ZFS behind the scenes.

 

- NTFS is bad -

You wouldn't happen to know if ReFS is significantly better than NTFS?

Not necessarily just from the POV of fragmentation, but also other stuff.

[Geekazoid]

-snip-

Very good post mate.

[IdeaStormer]

I'm honestly not that familiar with its inner workings, since I haven't

delved into that too deeply yet (I'm primarily familiar with what one

needs to know as an end user for deploying ZFS on small servers/NAS boxes

like I've been using it), but fragmentation seems to be the usual reason

given in the docs I've read. But yes, from the resources I've gone

through, there is indeed quite a lot going on in ZFS behind the scenes.

 

You wouldn't happen to know if ReFS is significantly better than NTFS?

Not necessarily just from the POV of fragmentation, but also other stuff.

 

I'm not so familiar with ReFS but it sounds like its better than NTFS, but I have yet to try it. Win 8.1, Win Serv 2k12 and up support it but they don't say how (OS disks or only CIFS mounts?) Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS

[BrightCandle]

Wow so many people that have no idea!

 

It does slow down as the drive fills, that is the unfortunate fact. The main reason for this is because as you fill it up from the outside in the platter speed is impacted and the performance drops. Every benchmark on the internet used to show a graph of the declining speed of the drive across its length but these days they don't do that because SSDs don't suffer the same issue. It seems its a lost art in the benchmarks. The last time I paid attention to this drives were about 120MB/s peak speed and they would drop to around 50-70 MB/s by the end (sequential transfer speed).

[MG2R]

Very good post mate.

Thanks! Took a while to write as well

 

Little request: please cut anything that isn't essential in a quote out, in order to make your posts shorter. It keeps the forum way cleaner. I've taken the liberty to edit your post. Thanks!

[Geekazoid]

Thanks! Took a while to write as well

 

No worries! I know a good write up when see one .

 

Little request: please cut anything that isn't essential in a quote out, in order to make your posts shorter. It keeps the forum way cleaner.

No worries. However I usually like to keep it there so other members as well as the OP know what I'm referring to. How about this, if I come across such a long post again that a member has posted I'll remove all but the first sentence and then put "..." after it so that everyone knows what I'm replying to, deal?

 

Example: "A hard drive is basically a fast moving metal platter..."

 

 

I've taken the liberty of edit your post. Thanks!

And I've taken the liberty of correcting your typos and grammar mistakes (you may want to correct them in the original post). 

[MG2R]

 

No worries. However I usually like to keep it there so other members as well as the OP know what I'm referring to. How about this, if I come across such a long post again that a member has posted I'll remove all but the first sentence and then put "..." after it so that everyone knows what I'm replying to, deal?

Do as you please

 

I usually put something like

 

<subject of quoted message />

... if that's needed to understand the answer .

 

Also, protip: if you ever want to find the original of a quoted message, you can click the arrow in the top right corner of the "quote box", but you probably already knew that

 

 

 typos and grammar mistakes

Darn, I'm usually pretty good at fixing errors while typing. Fixed.