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General discussion (archive)Tech Question, kind of game related.(21 posts)(21 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted May 26, 2013
I need to know how accurate a certain theory is regarding hard drives and it applies to this forum (unlike 99% of my other posts) because I get stuck in these ruts where I never know exactly what I want to play at any given minute so I end up installing EVERYTHING I buy here so I have it at my figure tips.

My question is, how true is it that an almost full hard drive can totally screw up performance? I'm an idiot with regard to this and kind of embarrassed about my specs but screw it. Here they are, space wise, and I'd like to know if any intellectuals out there can verify if its bad for gaming or even the computer as a whole.

Right now I I'm at 232 GB used space and 46.1 GB if free space left. Am I asking for trouble here or am I okay?
Posted May 26, 2013
Only if it is really close to full (5 gb or so left) since most programs need temporary space to work properly just like your webbrowser if you watch stuff on youtube or so.

Just keep some space you are good to go. It requires like maybe 3 gb for page files at most.

(That's just coming from my personal expierences.)
Posted May 26, 2013
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Jeralulz: Only if it is really close to full (5 gb or so left) since most programs need temporary space to work properly just like your webbrowser if you watch stuff on youtube or so.

Just keep some space you are good to go. It requires like maybe 3 gb for page files at most.

(That's just coming from my personal expierences.)
Thanks. I have to stop believing all these blogs I read about needing 50% empty on hard drive to get full FPS. :P
Posted May 26, 2013
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tinyE: Thanks. I have to stop believing all these blogs I read about needing 50% empty on hard drive to get full FPS. :P
Well you might need 50 % empty HDD if you have like 512 mb of ram :D since it won't be able to store a whole lot in the ram so it will directly load it from the Harddrive. It only really matters if you have like minimum system requirements and a close to full harddrive.
Posted May 26, 2013
I Googled this before and it told me that with newer (I think 64-bit) OS's hard-drive performance isn't affected by being too full.
Posted May 26, 2013
Pick up an nice 500GB (or larger) external Harddrive, to store your games on. That's what I did. Just plug 'er to the USB port, and your in business. Install what you need to to your 'puter, and delete what you're not playing (keep a copy of the save files though if you like).
Posted May 26, 2013
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jumbalia: I Googled this before and it told me that with newer (I think 64-bit) OS's hard-drive performance isn't affected by being too full.
My OS is about 2008 which is old in pc terms. This is only getting me confused. :P
Posted May 26, 2013
50% free space for maximum FPS - wow, people do write a lot of bull don't they.

The main thing that can slow a running game down, as far as hard drives are concerned, is fragmentation. And that is generally only during "scene changes" - i.e. when it is loading off disk. Some games do also stream from disk in the background but again, fragmentation is still the issue there. If you have very little system memory (RAM) you may end up swapping out to virtual memory (again on hard drive).

Now, keeping your hard drive fairly full can impact on fragmentation - because the drive has to hunt around for somewhere to put any new game you install - that why fragmentation occurs. It gets even worse if you are in the habit of installing and uninstalling often.

But a decent defragmenation tool should sort that out. I use IOBit Smart Defrag - but there are plenty others out there and everyone will have their favourite so Im not saying there is anything special about this one.

I would recommend that the biggest thing you can possibly do to improve performance (both in games and in general system use) is to turn off (or better, uninstall) all the unnecesary crap that starts up automatically and runs in the background on your machine. All those things the appear in the System Tray -
if you have more than a handful you probably have too many.
Posted May 26, 2013
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brianhutchison: 50% free space for maximum FPS - wow, people do write a lot of bull don't they.

The main thing that can slow a running game down, as far as hard drives are concerned, is fragmentation. And that is generally only during "scene changes" - i.e. when it is loading off disk. Some games do also stream from disk in the background but again, fragmentation is still the issue there. If you have very little system memory (RAM) you may end up swapping out to virtual memory (again on hard drive).

Now, keeping your hard drive fairly full can impact on fragmentation - because the drive has to hunt around for somewhere to put any new game you install - that why fragmentation occurs. It gets even worse if you are in the habit of installing and uninstalling often.

But a decent defragmenation tool should sort that out. I use IOBit Smart Defrag - but there are plenty others out there and everyone will have their favourite so Im not saying there is anything special about this one.

I would recommend that the biggest thing you can possibly do to improve performance (both in games and in general system use) is to turn off (or better, uninstall) all the unnecesary crap that starts up automatically and runs in the background on your machine. All those things the appear in the System Tray -
if you have more than a handful you probably have too many.
I defrag constantly and yeah I'm pretty good about hunting down and rooting out stupid shit; Dell is notorious for adding backup security systems you don't need. My biggest problem is like I mentioned above, I seem to have PC ADD. :P I get the urge to play NWN and fifteen minutes later I want to play Settlers, and ten minutes after that Far Cry. Well that means having ALL of them installed.

OT and to everyone; while I was waiting for an answer here I farted around and figured out the solution to another tech thread I made regarding recording. Now all I have to do is figure out how to convert my tracks to something I can post in here and then I can turn it up to eleven and annoy you fine people to lengths you never before thought possible. :D
Posted May 26, 2013
The main situation in which you'd see performance issues from a full HDD is if the space left is small enough that it's comparable in size to your pagefile. Paging is used to swap out some of the memory stored in RAM to the hard drive when dealing with memory intensive applications. On Windows the default size of the pagefile is 150% of the amount of RAM you have, but it can be expanded if required (and if your don't have hard drive space for the pagefile to expand into this can cause performance issues or sometimes larger problems). Others have already mentioned fragmentation, but this has an even greater effect on performance if the limited space on your hard drive is causing the pagefile to routinely become fragmented (since this will lead to significantly longer seek times when trying to read or write to the pagefile).

With your current HDD usage you shouldn't have any problems, although you're only one good-sized game install away from territory where you may start seeing some performance issues. If you're not strapped for cash I'd recommend just getting a second drive and using that to install any future games (you can pick up a good 500 GB drive for around $70-80 these days).
Posted May 26, 2013
I know how that's like. I have a 1,5 Tb hard drive and only 350 Gb of free space because of it.
Posted May 26, 2013
Yeah I really know feck all about this so I'm going to give the advice that everyone is thinking but no one has said... just delete some of the porn tinyE! :D
Posted May 26, 2013
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tinyE: Thanks. I have to stop believing all these blogs I read about needing 50% empty on hard drive to get full FPS. :P
Probably whatever you were reading was talking about SSD (solid-state drives) rather than HDD. From what I remember researching before I got mine, SSDs do perform better with more free space such as when you first get them. They write extremely fast at first when writing to fresh blocks, then over time, as there becomes less free space, the write performance takes a slight hit because there are fewer fresh blocks and it has to overwrite instead. It is something to do with how SSDs handle delete operations differently to HDDs. Even so we are talking nanoseconds, and read performance is NOT affected, so it would hardly impact games which are mostly reading data. And read/write on SSD is already significantly faster.

I have Win7 and a few select games installed on my 60GB SSD, and other games and assorted media <*cough*> on 1TB storage HDD. This kind of setup really is lightning fast for the OS and I would recommend it next time you look to upgrade.
Posted May 26, 2013
+1 to everyone who helped me out on this one. Not that rep matters but I'm broke so payment is out. :P
Posted May 26, 2013
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tinyE: Right now I I'm at 232 GB used space and 46.1 GB if free space left. Am I asking for trouble here or am I okay?
I must say go with Zoltan999 suggestion. http://www.gog.com/forum/general/tech_question_kind_of_game_related/post6
I myself have a combined total of 16TB with internal and external HD, and most of those are nearly full with data I need to keep, plus DVD backups and duplications on separate disks.

If you need to play a rotation of games then having external HD's can be a god send. You install some games to one disk, then others to another and keep save games on your internal HD, backing up to the external drive every so often. Then you just plug and unplug HD's as required and so long as you back up your saved games regularly, should anything happen you can just transfer the data across to a new computer or HD.
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General discussion (archive)Tech Question, kind of game related.(21 posts)(21 posts)
(21 posts)