One of the things to do to speed up any computer is to always keep some free space and free it if it is close to exhaustion. One might wonder why a computer, and even a smartphone, slows down all its operations when it has full disk memory and returns quickly when it is freed or emptied.
It seems strange, but in the end the disk behaves almost like RAM, volatile memory, the one that retains data only until the computer is turned off.
It is therefore important to have a lot of free disk space to keep the PC fast and performing "> Free up disk space on the hard disk in 8 ways
In reality the speed of a computer does not directly depend on the free space on the disk but on a combination of factors that also have to do with the use of the memory of a hard disk or an SSD drive.
The lack of free space is therefore not a direct cause of slow PC performance and although it is easy to say that the more free space there is, the faster the computer is false.
The speed of the computer is rather tied to other causes such as, for example:
- File fragmentation .
File fragmentation is a problem that is accentuated by the lack of free space.
The chances of a file being fragmented, that is, divided into various sectors of the disk, are not related to the amount of free space, but to the size of the largest free block.
A 95% full disk with all the free space in a single contiguous block will not give the possibility to fragment the next new file that will be written.
A disk that is only 5% full but with data spread evenly on the disk has a very high probability of fragmenting the next written files.
Obviously, however, the less free space there is, the more likely it is that there are not contiguous blocks large enough to contain new data without having to fragment them.
Fragmentation is certainly a problem when the fragmented files are the system and cache files of the most used programs.
For this reason, Microsoft has automated the defragmentation process starting from Windows 7, to avoid problems of this type.
READ ALSO: what does fragmentation mean and how useful is defragmentation?
This does not apply to new SSDs where the fragmentation problem does not exist and, therefore, enormously faster than traditional hard disks (for further details see the difference between SSD and Hard disk).
- File indexing
The indexing of files and their search is no longer slow if the disk is full, but only if the indexed data is many and more and more numerous.
- The number of installed programs
The more programs are installed the more the computer slows down if some of them start automatically.
The fact that the disk fills up because there are multiple programs installed does not affect PC performance.
READ ALSO: Causes and solutions of a slow computer
Therefore consider that if you have a slow PC, with many programs installed and many files inside it, even by cloning your disk to a larger and more spacious one, you will not get an improvement in performance.
The same software in use and the same degree of fragmentation will also be present on the new hard disk, even if there is a lot of free space on it.
Having said that, one might still wonder how much space it would be appropriate to leave empty on a hard disk .
Although, as mentioned, the lack of free space is not a direct consequence of a slow computer, it is still advisable to leave a little empty.
Meanwhile, because the defragmentation programs, the internal tool of Windows, require a minimum amount of free space to work (in Windows it is about 15 percent).
Leaving space is also useful for other functions of the operating system, for example to have a paging file with variable dimensions which makes up for the memory shortage.
In reality then the paging file (when the computer RAM is little, less than 2 or 3 GB), requires not to be fragmented otherwise the operations become very slow and, therefore, must be fixed.
See the guide to setting up the paging file in Windows.
Another reason to keep free space is the use of hibernation mode, the dynamically growing browser cache, the cache of other heavy programs like Photoshop.
The matter is different for solid state memories (those of tablets and smartphones) and SSDs that do not suffer from the fragmentation problem, but require some free space to operate.
This is because if there is little free space the computer will end up writing new data always in the same place and as SSD solid state memory deteriorates when there are too many writes, this is to be avoided.
For this reason, on some SSDs (not always) the so - called Over-Provisioning is therefore set, an unpartitioned space that the user cannot touch and that remains empty.
In conclusion, both for SSDs and hard drives, my advice is to keep at least 20-25% of free space at all times .
