Can running a HDD in the 'red zone' lead to premature wear?

B0bbyEwing

There's probably a term for it that I'm not aware of. To be clear -

If you go in to This PC in Windows 10 you'll see a list of your connected drives. When it gets low (probably a percentage of the drive I imagine) then it flags red - that's what I'm talking about.

Can this have a harmful effect on the drive or is it merely just a visual warning that you're getting low?

Reason for asking is I have a Seagate Barracuda drive that CrystalDiskInfo flagged with a warning within like the first year after purchase.

Recently downloaded Hard Disk Sentinel & it put the health at 10%.

I know anything can happen with technology, I just wondered if low free space could be a contributing factor or not.

Grumpy_chap

How full is the drive?

MattMattMattUK

Simple answer is no, a hard drive being full of data does not in any way harm it. It will lead to some performance degradation due to fragmentation and it being much harder to fix that with a full drive, but it does not physical harm and dropping below 90% capacity and defragmenting will return to normal performance.

Exodi

I think technically yes, but realistically no.

The issue would be fragmentation as illustrated above.

Think of it like this (and this is coming from how I understand fragmentation/defragmentation works - I could be completely wrong!), I have a new HDD, it has 10 empty memory spaces. Let's assume it reads them from left to right.

[_][_][_][_][_][_][_][_][_][_]

I have a couple of files of different size which I put on the HDD, which I'll denote with letters. It now looks like this. Let's say [A] is a document, [B] is a picture, [C] is a video.

[A][B][B][C][C][C][_][_][_][_]

This is very efficient, the memory for each file is together (not fragmented). Now let's say I want to install a game [D], but I'm worried it will fill up my memory. I delete my picture [B] and then install the game. I then realise I quite liked that picture and don't really need the document, so delete [A] and add [B] again. Now my memory looks like this:

[B][D][D][C][C][C][D][D][B][_]

You can see the drive is starting to become fragmented. This is a problem on a HDD because the drive physically locates the data. Whereas before if I accessed [B] it would only need to move to one location on the disk, now it needs to move to opposite ends of the disk - the same if I access my game [D].

This is obviously a very small example, fragmentation happens constantly in large scale (it's not just us deleting files, Windows is constantly creating and deleting temp files) likewise very large files can be spread across many different locations.

Defragmentation is a process that tries to move the memory back into the correct order - but it's not possible if your drive is almost full (as it's got no room to put stuff to the side while it tries to order things).

So I guess yes, theoretically having a full hard drive means it needs to work a little bit harder to locate files and may prevent you from defragging it if very full, but I imagine I doubt it'll have a meaningful impact on its life. If you really want to maximise lifespan, you wouldn't get it out the box!

Newcad

A HDD that is being written to all the time such as your OS drive should have 15-20% freespace for the OS to use. (It's a bit less required with SSD's but why push it if you don't have to?)
A storage drive needs less freespace but personally I wouldn't go below 10% free, except occasionally.

However you may have a bigger issue than the amount of freespace left:

As you have run two diagnostic tools (both respected tools) and both say that the drive is not healthy then don't ignore them - It's time to get another (larger capacity?) drive and copy the data off the unhealthy (failing) one to the new one.

It may last another few years, or it may fail tomorrow, but when that unhealthy drive fails it will then be too late and unless you have made a backup the data on it will be lost.

outtatune

By default Windows 10 and 11 'optimise' mechanical hard drives automatically to defragment data. Search the settings for 'drive optimisation' to see your settings.

bob2302

This seems to me the most important part of the original post:

"Reason for asking is I have a Seagate Barracuda drive that CrystalDiskInfo flagged with a warning within like the first year after purchase.

Recently downloaded Hard Disk Sentinel & it put the health at 10%."

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81939190#Comment_81939190

Thanks to all for the responses.

As for the above quote - I've actually already bought a replacement drive & moved everything across using TeraCopy. The 10% drive is in a box ready to be wiped & returned within the returns window.

I was just asking the question out of curiosity.

Newcad

Am I reading that right?

Remembering that in your original post you said:
".. I have a Seagate Barracuda drive that CrystalDiskInfo flagged with a warning within like the first year after purchase."

So that drive is unlikely to be within it's own return window or you would have said 'first months' not 'first year'.

In which case - are you saying that you have bought a new drive and are intending to return the old one in it's place for a refund or replacement?

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81942818#Comment_81942818

TLDR: No you're not reading it right.

Am I reading your post right?

Are you saying that the truth of the matter is too boring so let's make something up that isn't true because it's jucier than the reality?

This must be how innocent people in court feel when barristers start twisting things.

Newcad

OK - If the 10% drive is still within it's own returns window then that's fine.

However your "within like the first year" in the original post suggests that you may have had that 10 % drive for some months.