How Much of my Hard Drive Can I Use?

I have a Dell Latitude CPi laptop. It has a 6G hard drive. Apparently I have 3.7GB used and 2.3 GB available. Problem is I bought an 6GB iPod Mini. Whatever I store in my iPod Mini has to first be stored permanently on my hard drive so my Mini has alot more GB than I will be able to use.

ANYWAY, question is, how much of the hard drive is it safe to use? I think I've heard that after you use up a certain percent of total hard drive space, like 70% or something, you can start to experience more system crashes, or computer can run much slower.

Is this correct and also what percentage of hard drive space is it suggested I leave blank to keep my computer at it's best?

Thanks

Responses(6)

leduke30

4K Posts

0

July 21st, 2005 01:00

A CPiD can use up to a 30-32gb Harddrive and it might be time for a change. 6gb is not much drive for the way folks use laptops today. You need to have 15-20% free just to use defragmentation on the drive. I would run Disk Cleanup on the drive frequently until you make a change.

barb1283

27 Posts

0

July 21st, 2005 16:00

I will look at newer ones. I will check out used but newer models than mine. Thanks!!

leduke30

4K Posts

0

July 21st, 2005 16:00

These 2 sites sell OEM bagged drives at very reasonable prices and ship by Fedex or UPS ground to keep them out of airports with the High strength scanners in use since 9-11. The 5400rpm drives are your best bet and will help your older laptop at least 25% in speed. If you decide to shop for a used drive, insist the seller ship it by one of those 2 methods, or forget it. I have bought 5 harddrives in the last 2 months; 2 came by UPS and were ok, the other 3 all arrived DOA by USPS Priority. The last drive I bought before that came USPS Priority and was OK, but it was double wrapped in a heavily metallicized Anti-Static Bag. 'Nuff said?

www.newegg.com and www.zipzoomfly.com

barb1283

27 Posts

0

July 21st, 2005 17:00

Do you mean I could buy a new hard drive from one of these places and place into my existing laptop? I have a CPiA

leduke30

4K Posts

0

July 21st, 2005 22:00

Barb

I had a CPiA for awhile that was using a 60gb 5400rpm Hitachi, which was split 30-30(approx) and a W98/W-2000 Dual Boot setup with FAT32 format on both partitions. I really think that 30-40gb is a better choice for these older laptops though because of heat and power requirements. There are four screws on the bottom of the CPiA caddy to secure the drive and 2 more through the IDE adapter plug which is installed on the 44pin Interface of the drive. You must remove this Caddy and Adapter from your old drive and install it on your new one, as it is specific to the M'board and without it you are not connected; the drive will not be recognized by BIOS, DOS, or Windows without it. Incidentally, my daughter-in-law has the CPiA now with a smaller drive in it

barb1283

27 Posts

0

July 25th, 2005 00:00

Thanks for the info on changing the hard drive size. I don't know if I should because I am having some problems with the laptop. I bought it used last October to take on a trip with me. It worked fine when I got it but since January I have been getting alot of lines through the screen and the fan in it is noisey when it gets going. I use it alot. I think I paid about 145 for it and then I bought XP Home Edition to put on it. However the fan noise is irritating and the lines and blinking are tiring to my eyes.

I'm thinking perhaps I should sell this revealing the screen limitations and buy a later model used laptop.

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How Much of my Hard Drive Can I Use?