What would happen if you filled an HD or SSD to the last byte? Would it stop the pc from functioning?
In: Technology
I’ll be a little pedantic but it’s important to remember that the hard drive already is loaded from beginning to end with information, even if they are 0’s. It’s just not earmarked as being something to keep. After a while your drive is probably loaded with random strings of 0’s and 1’s but there are large sections that are not marked as being “data”. All that ever matters is whether the OS thinks something is worth keeping or not, and how it follows those rules.
At the same time, even if a section is marked as being “saved” you could easily overwrite lots of entries with random information and never notice the difference in reality. As long as you didn’t hit any critical program code, registry entries, etc, or actual data information that you happen to consume such as photos/videos which you would quickly notice. But those make up a small part and a blip or two here, blank frame in a video there would often go unnoticed but it depends on how that data is encoded – sometimes it doesn’t matter if information is missing or corrupt, other times it basically renders the entire file unrecoverable if there’s just 1 tiny error.
When a hard drive actually “fills up” what is happening is that it can’t physically fit a piece of data anywhere on the drive because everywhere else is marked as, “do not overwrite me”. It could probably do it anyway but that’s breaking the golden rules. And it’s more complicated because the data is fragmented into pieces that are stored all over the place, so as the non-earmarked spaces continues to diminish it becomes harder and harder to fragment a file in order to fit it all in those non-marked spots, to the point your computer is barely hanging on just because it takes so long to find those open spaces. Calculating the way in which to fit something into the few open spaces may require some of that space itself.
It can be such that even though your file would theoretically break down and fit into those unmarked spaces, that it can’t work anymore because of the extra overhead required to label all the pieces, and count everything. So you’re talking about making sure you have enough room for your file, plus enough room to calculate if you have enough room for your file, plus if you have enough room for that, repeated until something stops checking if it can.
At some point a running program will never get an answer for a HDD write, and even if it’s coded well for errors it has to fall back on the platform above it, which also will be out of space to continue. Even if every thread up the chain was carefully coded to handle out-disk-space problems you eventually run out of parent threads and the basic premise of the computer itself (assuming you have some hard disk space) doesn’t work anymore and it would shit itself.
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