Is using an external hard drive at near full capacity dangerous?

[RWJohnson06]

A question I often get is "Is using an external HDD at near full capacity a risk for the drive to become corrupted?" I have a 320gb Western Digital Passport at near full capacity 294gb used of the 298gb available and was wondering if this is a risk or possibly the question is a result from a myth that using a hard drive at near full capacity runs a risk of corruption. I understand that HDD's tend to randomly become corrupted but does running a particular drive at near full capacity increase that risk? Thanks in advance for any and all responses.

 

[vacunita]

A nearly full drive is juts as likely to become corrupt as a nearly empty one.
However, I strongly suggest you back up important stuff regularly to other media such as DVD's.

You are not going to be happy when the drive fails, and trust me it will eventually fail, as all drives do, and you have to restore 300Gb of information on it.

Backing up important data to alternate mediums is always a good thing.





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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[alexwilden85]

I've never heard of a hard drive corrupting due to being to empty or to full...it simply wont write to the disk.

Archive off some stuff you don't need to have at hand all the time

 

[cdogg]

The only argument I can think of to support that concern is that the more data you are dealing with, the higher the chance that items become fragmented. And with fragmentation comes more frequent head movement or higher chance of "disk thrashing". So in essence, making the hard drive work harder can wear down mechanical components at a greater rate.

It may increase the chance of failure but by how much is uncertain. I wouldn't worry too much about it. If data is changing frequently (being deleted and written), I would recommend you defragment the drive once a month. Any more than that will cause excessive wear. Also choose NTFS over FAT32 for better file management. From what I understand, NTFS doesn't suffer as much as FAT32 when it comes to fragmentation.

This article touches on disk thrashing and shows how newer SATA drives with NCQ (Native Command Queueing) technology reduce it:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/power-analysis-of-disk-io-methodologies/

~cdogg
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