Does having a full harddrive slow down computers performance?

Question

I have 2 gig of ram, two 160 gig harddrives and 3.5ghz of processing power. My second harddrive is filling up and my computer seems to be quite agitated by that. It is not the harddrive with the operating system installed, but i have all my programs installed on it, with about 50 gig of music and 80 gig of movies... Also the harddrive is slightly damaged in that it makes some horrid sounds at times and causes the computer to crash. Not going to bother replacing it as it doesnt matter i only use this pc for s******g around with media and my laptop for serious work... should i be installing programs on the OS harddrive instead as thats not very full?

Answer 1

Hi..

There are various reason due to which a computer may be slow.May be it is due to full hard drive also. Few more are virus, Spyware and so on.. Please have a look on the following article.It may hep you.

Answer 2

If your full disc is not the one where you have your operating system or programs installed you will not see a performance impact UNLESS you are trying to access files on that disk.

In your case it sounds as if the disk is badly broken. If it is making horrid noises it could fail and any point destroying all the data on that disk. Also if I understand you right you have some programs installed on this dodgy disk. If that is the case then when you are using those programs it is likely the performance will be slower as the computer needs more time to read the files.

Generally the advice is too keep at least 25% space free on a disk to avoid excessive fragmentation. If you use big files a lot or regularly run the space to just a few percent before deleting things again you will see a good benefit from a defrag

Answer 3

Hard drives are mainly for storage space, it has no affect how fast or slow your processor takes to complete tasks. Think of it as a bookshelf...the larger the bookshelf, the more space you can fill it with, but depending on how much processing capacity you have affects how much you can pick up at once.  The sounds you are hearing are more than likely a corrupt hard drive which will need replacing.

What will effect speed are the fragmented files on your hard drive disk.

You should defragment you hard drive regularly by clicking Start Menu, Programs, Accessories then System Tools and Disk Defragment. Your computer will work better and your processor will work faster.

Answer 4

YES

if u r using Vista then turn to XP SP2/SP3

Ths the most less consuming Space OS

Or ur HDD has BAD SECTORS,no efficient way to solve this just format ur WHOLE HDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 5

Well if your OS is not on that drive the fullness does not matter that much. But the fuller it gets, the more fracmented the files on there is probably be now. See each time, an application is run, that little harddrive arm has to work really hard to go and get all the fragments. Try to defrag the drive.

And if you think the harddrive might be kinda broken, then obviously that can be the cause as well. So the applications you use a lot, rather move them to the other drive