Jan 12, 2003 03:35 pm There are no specific numbers, but you can use WAY more than 50% that I know...the key to decent performance is keeping it defragged with Norton Speed Disk or a similar defragmenting tool.
Hard drive space
Posted on Jan 12, 2003 03:15 pm
guitar ed
Member Since: Nov 19, 2002
Can someone give me the lowdown on how full is too full when it comes to my hard drive? I do this as a hobby, so I don't have all the latest and greatest hardware. I do have a dedicated puter for recording, and I have a pair of 10-gig hard drives. Both are 5400 rpm. I have all my apps on my c drive, and I use the d drive for all my recording, like wave samples and stuff. I'm only using 3.2 gigs on my c drive, and I wanna know how full is too full? I've been told that if I fill my c drive more than 50 % I'm gonna start having problems. Can anyone verify this? It hasn't happened yet, but I purposely don't install all the stuff I'd like to because I don't wanna get bogged down. Thanks for any guidance.
Ed
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Jan 12, 2003 03:35 pm There are no specific numbers, but you can use WAY more than 50% that I know...the key to decent performance is keeping it defragged with Norton Speed Disk or a similar defragmenting tool.
Jan 12, 2003 03:36 pm Always leave at least 20% free space (definately on your c: drive, but on secondary drives you can get away with using up more space)
>50% free is space is nice but not essential
Make sure to defragment your drives once a month to keep them in the best shape
These are just rules of thumb for general pc use, but they should apply to recording too
Jan 12, 2003 03:55 pm I've filled my hard disc many times and had no problems.
It all depends on how you've used it over the months, deleting or moving large files can give you problems and sometimes if it crashes you can destroy the boot sector and then you need another hard disc to boot up.
Early warning signs for me have been regular hard disc activity, longer access times and basically program errors.
If you have your operating system on a different partition it should prevent losing any Wav files as it's Windows what causes problems.
Jan 12, 2003 05:39 pm As long as we are on the subject of best practices. Yes, the system drive (typically c:) size your pagefile (also known as swap file or virtual memory depending on the system) to 2 1/2 times the amount of RAM you have, some poeple say 2 time, whatever, it's debateable, the mian point being DON'T let Windows manage it by itself, set it to a hard value. If you need to you can set the pagefile to run on a different drive than the system, the pros and cons of this can be argued for either side...
Just some random thoughts.
Norton Utilities has worked great for me or many years in keeping my Windows install clean and fast as well as optimizing my registry and defraging my hard drives. if you don't have a system utility like Norton Utilities (there are many others) I highly recommend getting one. v-com has some nice ones too. www.v-com.com/
Jan 13, 2003 04:26 am Yeah! Norton Utilities is what I use and It is very handy indeed.
Jan 13, 2003 08:17 pm Hey db, what does Norton do as far as defragging that the defrag utility in winxp doesn't? I've never used a dedicated defrag app. Just did it from windows. Am I missing out on something? Thanks
Ed
Jan 13, 2003 08:23 pm The Windows defrag is actually owned by the Norton people (Symantec) and leased to Microsoft. It is a very lite version of Norton's real defragger, without getting real specific it does organize the clusters much more logically that is very easy to notice when looking at a map of the drive. Windows does OK, but it does not do things like move your most used apps to the fastest part of the hard drive and optimize the registry like Norton full-blown utilities suite does.
Jan 14, 2003 12:01 am I gotcha. I'll have to look into that. Thank you, my friend.
Ed
Jan 14, 2003 05:25 am No problemo at all. I just got Norton System Works 2003. Very nice indeed.
Amazon.com has a great deal on it right now with a special offer:
www.amazon.com/exec/obido...543573/sr%3D1-1
Jan 18, 2003 06:13 pm OK, I got Norton Utilities 2000. I optimized and all that good stuff, and I see what you mean about how it places files. Looking around in there has prompted another question regarding physical memory. I have 192 megs of RAM, and when my puter is just sitting there idle, I'm supposedly using 54% of my physical memory. When I open Sonar, it jumps to 77% usage. Is this normal? Good? Bad? I just did a clean install of WinXP a week ago, and this time around I didn't install Service Pack 1. Normally I do. Where is all that memory going if I have nothing running? Does this sound like a problem? I need to know before I tear this thing down and format again. I don't mind doing that, cuz I really don't install much besides Sonar and whatever wave editor I'm partial to at the time. Any insight would be much helpful. Thanks.
Ed
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