How much space do you typically want to leave free on an
external harddrive that you will be editing from? 10%?

From my experience somewhere between 10 and 20%. It also depends on how much the hard drive is going to work. HD vs 4k vs SD. Is that drive set up to handle the render files for color correction or effects? Not suggested but may not be avoidable. I would error to the side of caution and stay closer to 20% if you can. Good luck.

10% would be pushing things, I like the "20% or more" option and in reality try to never get anywhere near that full - I offload finished work to another drive for archiving. Something else to consider is drive fragmentation - if it is nearly full, could also be quite fragmented if you don't defrag on a regular basis, and the other issue is, you may not be able to defrag when the drive is getting close to full. Ample free space is required to defrag since files must be rewritten temporarily while shuffling all that data around.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera

The smaller the drive, the higher percentage of free space is needed. The larger the files, the higher percentage is needed. The key is to leave enough space so the disk can be managed and defragmented efficiently. 10-20% is a good general guideline.

Also, if your files are static (for instance, just reading the files for non-destructive editing and writing the renders elsewhere), you won't need as much free space. On the other hand, if you're continually writing files to the disk, it will need more free space to keep the new bits organized.

Hey, something we all agree on here!
I have about 40-50 1TB-2TB portable drives and once I get close to 20% remaining, I start to detect some slow down. By the time I get down to 10%, it's a real drag.

Mark