Hard drive question

[Foxman]

Ok, for many years I have operated under the assumption that you shouldnt fill a hard drive much beyond the half way point or it might become unstable. This might be a myth, I don't really know. So, I made the "media" PC for my CD's and am using 2 hard drives. One drive that has windows and virtually every program that my computer uses and then the second one that litteraly has one file labeled music and it contains roughly 170 gigs of music out of 250, leaving me with roughly 68 gigs of unused hard disk space. So, my question is, at what point do I need to add another hard drive for another music file? Is it safe to trust putting more music on this drive?

Any help would be appreciated.

Oh and I know some are curious how much space each cd takes up and such. According to WMP I have 6611 Items which represents how many songs are on my PC or at least that's how I interpret it. I think I have roughly 800-900 cd's but I don't know how the get the info from the computer

[Kevin P]

The only "dangers" with filling a hard drive too full are (a) if it's your boot drive or it contains your temp folder, if it fills applications or Windows may experience problems or crashes, and (b) an overly full drive can get fragmented, causing reduced performance.

If it's a data-only partition where the data doesn't change much (e.g. music library, where files are added but rarely changed/deleted), there should be no problem filling the disk to near capacity.

As for how much space a CD takes up, that depends on what encoding/compression scheme is used, what bitrate is used, and how long the CD is. Uncompressed CD-quality stereo PCM takes 176 kilobytes per second, 10.5 megabytes per minute, so a full 80-minute CD would take up 847 megabytes uncompressed. Naturally, compressed schemes like MP3 etc. will use up a lot less space.

From Explorer, you can right click the folder containing your music files and click Properties, to get the total number of files (songs?) and the total space they take up.

[Foxman]

From Explorer, you can right click the folder containing your music files and click Properties, to get the total number of files (songs?) and the total space they take up.

Thank you for sharing that information. So, I am good to pretty much filler up, although I would assume it would be prudent to get another hardrive as a back up as well as an additional one for when this get's full.

As far as files. According to my PC I have 796 folders (cd's I assume) and 9675 Files (songs I assume)

I thought 6611 sounded like too few.