how does freeing up storage space make your computer faster?
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Deleting files on your computer can help make it run faster for a few reasons. First, if your hard drive is full, your computer has to work harder to access and save files, which can slow it down. When you delete unnecessary files, there is more room for your computer to save and access the files that you need, which can help it run more efficiently. Additionally, if you have a lot of old or unnecessary files on your computer, they can take up space and make your computer run slower. Removing these files can help your computer run more smoothly. Finally, if your computer has a lot of programs running in the background, they can take up space and resources, which can slow your computer down. Removing unused programs and apps can help your computer run more efficiently.
In general, it doesn’t.
If your hard drive is almost completely full then it can have an impact. Your operating system may temporarily dump some of the values it’s tracking in RAM to your hard drive to make use of RAM for something else to speed things up. If there’s not enough space on the drive to do that, it could affect performance.
If you have 1 tb drive and go from using 700 gb to 500 gb it won’t make a difference with respect to performance, though.
It some circumstances, especially with older spinning hard drives (contrasted with new SSD solid state drives), freeing up storage space can make the hard drive faster.
The computer writes a lot of files for its work. As the disk fills up, it can become “fragmented”. The available storage space is not in one useful chunk, but spread out in various locations.
Imagine you want to store a 1 MB file. There is 1 MB “free”, but it’s in pieces. There’s 100K here, 80K there, 200K somewhere else. Writing that single 1 MB file will require the head of the hard drive to move to many locations to fit parts of the file where it can.
But as you free up disk space, it becomes easier to find single long blocks of free space to write the data. This means writing a 1 MB file can be a single action by the hard drive and will be noticeably faster.
There are also VM files (Virtual memory). This is space on the disk that the computer uses to help make RAM look bigger. By putting unused stuff in RAM on the hard drive, it can free up space. This works well in practice because if you have Excel open, but switch to working Mail for a few minutes, much of the RAM used by Excel can be sent to the disk to make more RAM available for Mail. When you go back to Excel, it will seamlessly bring that back in.
Some OS’s put the VM files in the regular file system and they can become fragmented as well. The more clean open space there is, the faster the VM files can be written and read. Not all OS’s do this, some reserve a special place for VM that can’t become fragmented in the same way.
Freeing up storage space on a computer can help to improve its performance in several ways. First, having more available storage space can allow the computer to run more efficiently by providing it with the necessary space to store temporary files and other data that is needed for various processes. This can help to prevent the computer from becoming cluttered and slowed down by a lack of available space. Additionally, having more available storage space can also allow the computer to load and access files more quickly, which can help to improve its overall speed and performance. Finally, freeing up storage space can also help to improve the computer’s overall stability and prevent it from crashing or experiencing other issues due to a lack of available space.
When you free up storage space on your computer, you’re essentially making more room for the operating system to save and access files. This can help your computer run more efficiently and improve its overall performance.
Here’s why: your computer’s storage, or hard drive, is like a filing cabinet where the operating system stores all the files, programs, and data that you use on your computer. When you open a program or access a file, the operating system has to retrieve it from the hard drive and load it into the computer’s memory, or RAM, so that it can be used.
If your hard drive is nearly full, there may not be enough room for the operating system to save new files or load existing ones quickly. This can cause your computer to slow down, because the operating system has to work harder to find the files it needs and load them into memory.
By freeing up storage space on your hard drive, you’re giving the operating system more room to save and access files. This can help it run more efficiently and improve your computer’s overall performance. For example, your programs and files may open and load faster, and your computer may feel more responsive overall.
Freeing up storage space on your computer can help to make it faster for a few reasons. When a computer’s storage is full or nearly full, it can slow down the performance of the computer in several ways. First, when a computer’s storage is full, it may not have enough space to create temporary files and cache data, which are used to improve the performance of the operating system and applications. This can cause the computer to run more slowly, as it has to work harder to access and process data.
Second, when a computer’s storage is full, it can cause the computer to become fragmented, which means that the data on the hard drive is not stored in a contiguous block. This can make it more difficult and time-consuming for the computer to access and retrieve data, which can slow down the performance of the computer.
Finally, when a computer’s storage is full, it can cause the computer to run out of virtual memory, which is a type of temporary storage that the computer uses when it doesn’t have enough physical memory (RAM) to run all of the programs and processes that are currently running. This can cause the computer to crash or freeze, or to run more slowly overall.
Therefore, freeing up storage space on your computer can help to improve its performance by providing more space for temporary files and cache data, reducing fragmentation, and preventing the computer from running out of virtual memory.
It can, in the days of spinning disks the more data that was written to the disk the less efficient the disks got when seeking. The only circumstance where you really see a performance impact is if you have a full drive with a lot of fragments that is trying to utilize a lot of swap. Swap is already far slower than memory, you can compound that problem by having the swap file on a full disk. Server administrators (hey, that was me!) used to put the swap on its own volume so that if some knob-head filled up the disks you would still have a performant system.
Oh right, swap is like…something you would typically store in RAM but since RAM is expensive and you have a limited supply, you put those things onto disk. You don’t *need* to use swap, but I have run systems without it that would need to write more into memory than available memory and that data was just lost into the ether never to be seen again. Don’t ask, it was a very particular application on a very particular system and it should never have been designed that way.
Most of the time, it doesn’t – at least not with modern computers.
For computers with an SSD drive instead of a hard disk, it makes no difference. If you eventually fill the disk, some software will not work properly because when it wants to save stuff, there’s no space.
On older computer with spinning disks, the disk could fill up leaving only small areas of the disk still unused. The computer then has to access those various spaces that are far apart on the disk to squeeze out the last bit of space when it needs it. To do so means waiting for the disk to spin around to the right spot, and a read-head to move to it. It’s slow. Freeing up space on the disk fixes this.
In much older systems, it would happen that the computer might store files in chunks in different areas of the hard disk, and the more fragmented the file became, the slower everything having to do with files became. Their, you’d run a program to “defragment” the disk, which just meant moving files around so that all the chunks were next to each other on the disk (which sped it up).
With modern computers, we’ve worked out various ways to prevent files from fragmenting, and SSD disks have no moving parts, so you don’t get a performance penalty even if it does happen.
Don’t forget a computer doesn’t store file in one chunk but in multiple one.
So when you ask it to write something it needs to find chuck that are available.
Then, since they may be splitted all around, a typical mecanical hard-drive need way more time to read/write all around instead of sequencial
Making a simple analogy thus not covering everything:
Imagine you have physical folders of documents on your desk, you want to find stuff or move stuff around to organise and fill some forms with data from one place to another.
With only a few of them it is fairly easy, but past a certain point it becomes a chore to do it, so instead of working with the documents and finishing the work you have to do, you spend more and more time just managing the said documents.
This is only an analogy for a filesystem and depending the type of filesystem it might be more or less prone to these issues. Also, if your workload doesn’t need to check for these documents, then it doesn’t really matter how full your disk/desk is – note that the computer OS often has background tasks that actually use the disk in one way or another.
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