Can low storage space lead to a slow running pc?

[Mark Wayne]

I know there are a lot of things that can lead to a slow running pc, but is it true that when there are only a few gigs of space left on a drive that it can lower processing speeds?

[Wiz Feinberg]

I know there are a lot of things that can lead to a slow running pc, but is it true that when there are only a few gigs of space left on a drive that it can lower processing speeds?

Absolutely! When you run out of disk storage, all that's left is RAM. When the RAM gets filled, which always happens first, the only place left to swap out data is the hard or solid state disk. If that drive is almost full there won't be anywhere for the swapfile to work.

Interestingly, this has happened to my business partner's laptop at work. For the longest time I thought it had a rootkit or other virus that was slowing it to a crawl. I never spend much time dinking with it because we have real work to do. But, when it downloaded Windows 10 and tried to install it, the process halted with an error message about insufficient disk space. When I saw that he had only a few gigs left, I instantly knew what had been going on with his slow computer.

Until recently, Laptops tended to have smallish hard drives. This is especially true for the second hand off-lease Dell Latitudes like I have been using at work. On Friday I looked at my disk situation and found that my Dell Latitude is also running very low on free space. It only has a 150 gig hard drive.

[Mark Wayne]

Thank you, Wiz. I was actually hoping you would say that, and it seems that is the case for me.

There are alot of variables, but what would you say would be a sufficient amount of space that I should keep open, say on a 500gb hard drive? 100gb? 50? 20?

[Wiz Feinberg]

I'd say make sure you have at least 50 GB (10%) available disk space at the worst of times, on a 500 GB drive.