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Does Having Many files on your Computer Slow it Down?
Actually no. Unless you search for files on your hard drive on a daily basis or have less than 1% disk space left having a hard drive full of files does not effect your daily computer operation. This includes music, documents, pictures, videos, programs etc…
So what are these files?
Files on your computer are nothing more than bits of data, 1s and 0s. When they are sitting on your computer they do not effect how fast you browse the web, or play a game, or watch a movie, or how fast your computer starts up.
You can think of your hard drive as a filing cabinet just storing your files for use at a later time. When you need to pull up a file your computer knows the precise location of the file and retrieves the file extremely fast. Simply adding more files to the cabinet only makes the search for the file marginally slower but it doesn’t make your computer run slower.
So Where did this misconception come from?
Well, back in the old days, (only a few years ago) computers had relatively small hard drives and they were expensive. Many times a computer would only have a hard drive large enough to hold the operating system and only a few programs. The problem back then was that when the hard drive was full it would have little/no space left for virtual memory (backup memory for when the ram gets full) and the computer would suffer in performance when using programs requiring lots of RAM. Today hard drives have become much cheaper and are able to hold a lot more files and programs. These large drives rarely become full and this is no longer an issue. This performance loss due to a full drive will only happen if your hard drive is more than 99% full.
Another reason someone might mistakenly believe their computer is slow because of many files is due to P2P (peer to peer) programs. Many times people will install P2P programs to download music. After awhile they collect a few MP3s and they begin to notice that their computer is running much slower. They assume that their computer is slow because of the collection of MP3s on their computer. What is really happening is that the P2P programs are installing adware/spyware on the computer. These are programs that are running constantly using system resources thus causing your computer to run slower. Any program a computer is currently running will use some system resources. As soon the P2P program installs enough of these you will begin to notice the drop in computer performance. To get rid of spyware see the Spyware Removal Guide.
So there are many reasons why your computer might start running slow but having many files stored on your hard drive will not have any noticeable effect to our normal computer operations. If you are having problems with a slow computer you may have adware/spyware, a virus, many startup programs, or winrot.
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14 Responses to Does Having Many files on your Computer Slow it Down?
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Yep,
Unfortunately you are mistaken. Maybe you are reffereing to more programs that you have running vs. static files sitting on your hard drive. You see when Quake 3 runs it loads most of the files it needs into memory, hence the “load screens” the game then periodically access files on the hard drive. As long as all the files are in one location on the hard drive there is no delay as they hard drive is read in one location the other files on the hard drive are not even seen or sorted through. The only time you would experience a delay is if the Quake 3 files were scattered across the hard drive. Then and only then the hard drive would have to seek them out. You will notice that all hard drives have a specific seek time. This is what they are measuring. Fortunately this is an easy problem to fix you simply need to defragment the drive.
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Krazy-Koo says:
My computer for some reason, seems to work very slow when I watch videos online, however everything else on it works great. It’s a brand new laptop, 5 months old, and it recently started doing this. Any help? Thanks!
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Which videos are slow? Youtube?
Do you have get any random popups or weird advertisements? Are you up to date with all the Windows updates? What are you using to watch videos? A web browser like Firefox or IE?
If you are watching in a web browser try switching browsers and check performance.
Also… are the movies choppy or do they have a problem loading. Possibly a connection problem?
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It’s videos on Youtube and Omegatube. For what I know, windows says it’s up to date with updates. and I use IE. Could be a connection problem, but I have 4 bars >.<
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Oh and no weird popups either
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Moose says:
I Completely agree with this article, using up space on your HD doesn’t matter one bit unless you cut into page file or you don’t defrag (cause obviously the added files aren’t defragged)
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This is not true. The more files you have in your hard drive, the slower it is even if they are not running or used by a program. Though not directly used by your OS or programs, they affect the seek time and other IO operations of the disk. Try putting like 100,000 small files in your hard drive then observe the performance. That is why disk cleanup also helps improve performance. Also, most mission critical servers have separate partition for programs and application data because of this.
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Daniel,
If you are running a file server or some sort of service that requires seeking you will notice a slow down. This doesn’t effect most people. You can also cut down most of the seek time by defragmenting or switching to a journaled file system like ext3.
As far as seperating applications from real data is a great idea. This is something I recommend doing on any computer home, office, or server. This allows for a quick format or reghost without loss.
Mark
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oh yeah, gotta store those files elsewhere. I was doing great until I decided to format my laptop which had important things scattered all over it
My desktop is always ready to format, though. I swear!
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Mark is very smart.
My girlfriend was going to reformat ALL of her ten billion photographs to get her computer to work better. I stopped her just in time. -
Having excess stuff on your HD does NOT slow it down… it’s usually an accumulation of spyware / adware (even viruses) from downloading and installing so much junk.
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Thanks – I’m working with an old PC that is loaded with files and programs and I notice that the longer it runs, the slower it grows during the day.
that is false, i play a video game called quake 3 arena, the less on your harddrive the better, the better performance you will have.