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should i move my files?
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bastard
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Join Date: Oct 2004
 
2005-03-03, 17:41

my laptop has a lot of files on it... mostly photoshop files, renderings and photos which are taking up a bit over 30gigs. im curious, if i move these files to an external hard drive will my laptop improve performance or is this insignificant?
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Luca
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-03-03, 18:39

It depends more on how much room you have left. If you're down to under 5 GB, then moving them will definitely help. If you still have 20 or 30 GB left, don't bother. Generally I'd advise you to keep any hard drive no more than 75% full.
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bastard
Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
 
2005-03-03, 19:30

thanks, im definitly gonna move em now
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Kickaha
Likes his boobies blue.
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hell
 
2005-03-03, 20:28

Quote:
Originally Posted by Luca
It depends more on how much room you have left. If you're down to under 5 GB, then moving them will definitely help. If you still have 20 or 30 GB left, don't bother. Generally I'd advise you to keep any hard drive no more than 75% full.
Forgive my ignorance, but... why?
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Luca
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-03-03, 20:32

Well, I'm not sure about the percentage thing. For large drives there's no sense in keeping 25% open. I mean, if you have a 250 GB hard drive, you don't have to keep 60 GB open. My suggestion is that if you have under 5 GB left, then it may start infringing on your swap file. Other than that it's mainly for convenience. If anything happens where you need to copy a large file to your hard drive and you have 3.5 GB left, it'll cut down on your space even more and make things kind of messy and difficult to manage. A lot of what I said is merely for convenience's sake, though I am somewhat aware of OS X liking it when you have at least a few extra GB of space.
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Kickaha
Likes his boobies blue.
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hell
 
2005-03-03, 20:38

Ok, 5GB I can understand, it was the % thing that threw me.

I frequently am running with only about 3GB free *pre* swap space usage, with my research apps taking up nasty amounts of RAM (hundreds of MB per thread), and haven't had any trouble. So far.

5GB OTOH, is a nice even round number for people to use as a guideline so they don't get into trouble.

@kickaha@social.seattle.wa.us
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wuf
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Elizabeth City, NC
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2005-03-03, 21:22

Quote:
5GB OTOH, is a nice even round number for people to use as a guideline so they don't get into trouble.
Crap...My computer at the office has a 6GB HD....Guess I'm screwed.....I'm happy if I have a few hundred MB's open...Think I'm at ~250 right now....

"Have you hugged your Mac today?"
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Luca
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-03-03, 22:37

That'll just hurt performance by a lot. It won't actually ruin things, but it'll be much slower because the system won't be able to cache anything. If it tries putting anything in the system cache, it would have to constantly swap stuff around since you have so little swap space available.

Upgrading to a 20 GB or larger hard drive should give you a significant performance boost. I remember running with 200 MB or so free, on a 2 GB hard drive in a Wallstreet PowerBook. OS X itself took over 1 GB.
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torifile
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2005-03-03, 22:40

wuf, you really should consider getting a bigger HD. They're so cheap these days. Get a 7200 RPM drive. It'll give your computer new life. We have a 400mhz iMac at home that I upgraded to a 120 gig 7200 rpm drive from the 10gigs it had. It made a world of difference.
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