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