Why does having more things downloaded on my computer slow it down?
In: Technology
Your hard drive is being occupied my writing the downloaded files onto it, and when you open a program, the hard drive puts it in a queue, it first writes what it has downloaded and then reads the program, that’s why there is a delay
If you’re running out of space, it can affect your computer. The disk doesn’t fill up like a bucket of water, more like a Tetris grid. When it gets really close to full, there aren’t holes big enough to store things so it starts putting fragments everywhere. Fragments are harder to read and use than whole files.
Also, some apps use free space like scratch paper. If they can’t get enough scratch, they can act up. Running out of space really pisses off photoshop.
But just downloading a lot of things, and say having half your disk free? That shouldn’t slow you down at all. It doesn’t take it longer to find files because it doesn’t search for them that way. It keeps indexes of everything and the time to look up 1/1,000,000 isn’t meaningfully slower than 1/10,000.
Normally just downloading files and data shouldn’t affect how fast your computer works.
Unless you are downloading so much that your hard-drive is nearly full and doesn’t have enough room left for ordinary operations it shouldn’t matter. 500MB of free space or 500GB of free space on your drive don’t really matter.
In older days you could run into trouble due to fragmentation where the data you were accessing was all over the drive, but that is much less of an issue today and really shouldn’t have any noticeable effect for you.
What does slow down your computer is installed applications especially ones that run in the background all the time.
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