Does freeing up space speed up a computer?

6 thoughts on “Does freeing up space speed up a computer?”

1. jasin says:

   April 4, 2011 at 6:35 am

   It does not speed up the computer it just makes accessing the data seem faster. More free space means there is less crap on the computer to sort through and/or go around. On some drives with lots of free space the data can be more compact, more data in smaller segments of the drive. But that’s typically only for hard drives 1TB or bigger. The best thing to do for the hard drive is to consolidate the free space and defrag. Most defrag programs will do all that.

   edit:

   The best thing in general that you can do to speed up your computer is to get a faster hard drive and a faster cpu. If you do not have a lot of ram that can help some too, but ram in its self wont speed up the computer it’ll just keep it from slowing down by providing more temporary storage for programs to access and run from.

   Chrisallis is right too. Moving system files to the front of the drive can speed things up some as its the data is more easily accessible.

2. Mark M says:

   April 4, 2011 at 6:35 am

   defragging your pc can a little and cleaning up broken shortcuts etc… adding ram to your pc speeds it up.

3. William says:

   April 4, 2011 at 6:35 am

   The answer is Maybe*

   When your hard drive is over 90% full, you start getting a lot of performance problems. So if you’re in that range, removing extraneous data can help noticeably. If you’re 75% full or below, it won’t help you. Defragmenting is all you can do at that point to help performance from a Hard Drive perspective.

4. Andy says:

   April 4, 2011 at 6:35 am

   Not really no.

   You’re better off defragmenting the hard drive.

5. Hanyuu says:

   April 4, 2011 at 6:35 am

   No. Those are dependent on processing speed, not hard drive space.

6. kjr says:

   April 4, 2011 at 6:35 am

   Just freeing up space will not speed up the pc if there are other factors like fragmentation slowing it down. As a general rule, about 15% free space is needed for the Windows dferagger to run efficiently (though third party automatic defraggers defrag well with as less as 2%) and if the drive is running out of free space and also fragmented, it will slow things down. To speed up the pc, run regular diskcleanups and defragment (real time defrag will handle fragmentation as and when it occurs). Also keep the pc free from malware and viruses with efficient programs.

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