Hard drive almost full to capacity

[Matt Crawford]

I normally keep a minimum of 10 - 20% free on my drives but recently while operating I had to almost fill the HD of MacBook Pro 2.33Ghz 2gb ram 10.4 right up with under 2GB free, was importing using Lightroom with a backup copy being written to an external disk simultaneously. As the free space came close to 2GB the importing almost ground to a halt.
I was wondering if this is to do with the virtual memory and if the laptop had had 4gb of ram would it have come closer to filling the HD before slowing?

Matt

[robertpoll]

Probably not - the most likely cause is that the 2GB you had free was very fragmented - i.e. made up of many small chunks spread right across this disk. As you can imagine, writing a file is very slow as the disk head has to make many movements as it accesses all of the small its of space. It's possible that more memory would help as it acts as a cache between the application and the disk but really you'd be better off spending the money on a larger disk I think - getting to more than 90% full is best avoided.

...rob

[Matt Crawford]

Cheers for the reply Rob,
I agree going over 90% full on a disk is asking to be crawling along at a snails pace. I was operating for a photographer on their laptop and they didn't expect to shoot 60GB+.
In future I'll take my own external disk with me.

[mauro risch]

I've used the partitioning strategy for more than 10 yrs now.
First thing I do when I receive the machine, is to partition the drive into 4 separate pieces.
If the HD is a 100GB, I'd have 25GB on each partition. You can choose to partition into asymmetric spaces too.
Partition #1 is where I normally keep, as the startup disk, all the system and applications.
Partitions #2 and 3 are the ones where I save my jobs.
Partition #4 is always empty, and it is used as a preferred scratch disk on photoshop.
It seems to make the performance much better on my macs.