Boot partition free space

  • Thread starter Thread starter Branden Wolner
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Branden Wolner

Hi,

I was wondering if there is a rule of thumb for how full you can let your
primary boot partition become. Mine is 8GB and it is currently 56% free
space. At what point should I worry that it's too full? Does defrag'ing
become an issue at some point? Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks.
 
As you suggest, it's a rule of thumb and it varies according
to personal preferences. My yardsticks are 30% and 20%:
I get concerned when the amount of free space drops below
30%, and I will certainly act when it drops below 20%.

I don't know what you mean with your defragging question.
Defragging will not free up any disk space, as you probably
know; it only re-arranges the fragments. On the other hand,
the defragging process struggles when a disk gets too full.

I often wonder if frequent defragging makes any substantial
difference for the average PC (as opposed to a file server),
other than giving the owner a warm feeling inside.
 
As you suggest, it's a rule of thumb and it varies according
to personal preferences. My yardsticks are 30% and 20%:
I get concerned when the amount of free space drops below
30%, and I will certainly act when it drops below 20%.

I don't know what you mean with your defragging question.
Defragging will not free up any disk space, as you probably
know; it only re-arranges the fragments. On the other hand,
the defragging process struggles when a disk gets too full.

I often wonder if frequent defragging makes any substantial
difference for the average PC (as opposed to a file server),
other than giving the owner a warm feeling inside.
Click to expand...
My concern was that if your partition is fragmented and you don't have
enough free space to move things to, you might not be able to defrag. Is
this a concern?

Thanks for those 30-20 numbers. Sounds good to me.
 
Branden Wolner said:
My concern was that if your partition is fragmented and you don't have
enough free space to move things to, you might not be able to defrag. Is
this a concern?
Click to expand...

It is, as I mentioned in my first post.

<snip>
 
Do not let it slip below 500MB (also rule of thumb). The size of your safety
net depends on your "consumers", too (pagefile, databases, logs you might
have there-- they're all over the place in %windir%)-- specifically, on how
large they are and how fast they grow. That's why you want to use settings
that'll move as many of these elswehere as possible.

You might want to consider keeping a log of the space by directory (the more
important ones, not all 5,000 of them...). Then, if you have to, you can at
least narrow it down and use some crude search by size or timestamp to
locate the culprit. This came in handy once when we noticed free space
decreasing and were able to link it fairly quickly to a Symantec AntiVirus
problem.

Mike D
 
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