how does freeing up storage space make your computer faster?
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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.
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