How much free space should I leave in OS partition ?

Hi,

I just got a new PC with following configuration and have made 9 partitions on my 500 GB hard disk and

have 2nd 500 GB HDD as slave with 2 partitions, one has Win -7 Ultimate & 2nd partition is where I store Movies & Video Files.

The OS Partition is 100Gb & I have installed all applications in OS Partion.

All the applications with Win -7 Ultimate 64 bit has taken up 50 GB space.

I do download some stuff everyday & it goes in Downloads folder & takes up upto 25 GB of space.

Thus I am left with 25 GB free space.

In order to have a lightening fast performance, how much free space should I leave in the OS Partitions ?

Here are the specs of my system :

Intel Core i-7 2600 Sandy Bridge ( 3.4 GHz ) Processor


8 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333 MHz

Windows -7 Ultimate ( 64 bit )

500 GB Sata 3.0Gb/s HDD

Second 500 GB HDD which I am using as a slave drive to store Movies etc.

Creative PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi™ Xtreme Audio

Hauppauge® WinTV-HVR-1200 Hybrid Analog/Digital TV Tuner


1 GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GT420 as default video card.

Thank You.

 

Hi,

I think the standard rule is about 50% free space is optimal on the OS drive. 33% is probably fine--when I get to 33% free I start thinking about increasing partition size or deleting unused programs (but I only use 50gb for my OS partition--so 33% is ~15gb). So in your case 33% free of 100gb is still 34gb which is quite a lot of space.

Now, If you download 25gb a day then why not change the default download location to one of your other partitions? That way there is less being written to the OS partition, less temporary files (partial downloads) etc. on the OS partition. Your OS partition would stay around 50gb at all times. I can't think of any benefit to downloading to the OS partition first, then moving the files to other partitions later.

 

This ^^
If you split up your OS from your Data partitions then you should never download anything to your OS partition.
Create a TEMP folder on your Data drive and set the default ie/chrome downloads to this.
OS should only be for installation programs, nothing temporary.

Further to this, even the programs that are installed on OS should point to Data folder, all Photoshop/Creative/Limewire and especially Bittorrent programs and important data files should be stored on the Data drive.

That way you should only really backup a specific data folder on the Data drive that contains all config and important files, all you need to do is reinstall software in case of crash.

Simon