Harddrive Is Probably Full • Hacker News Board

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#21

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

AKSF_Ackermann wrote: post #6

And i am wondering what do people even fill their storage with, and why do they need so much. In my case it is ~200-300 out of 1TB on 2 laptops, 37 out of 128gb on phone. And i don't even actively manage it.

Photos, movies, MP3, SDKs for various kinds of systems, PDFs (and PS) of computing papers collected during the last 35 years, and naturally games.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#22

Post by toast0 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:24 PM UTC

nubinetwork wrote: post #18

throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

If you're on Windows, WizTree ( https://diskanalyzer.com/ ) is great for figuring out what's consuming your storage space. On Linux/macOS you can use `du` from the command line (or ask an AI to make a convenience wrapper for you).

> 46x faster than windirstat Thats a pretty bold claim, but is it really that much faster?

I just ran it for the first time... I've run windirstat many times including in the last two weeks and yes, this is very fast. According to its timing it took 3.63 seconds to scan my drive... I'm not sure if it really took almost 3 minutes for windirstat, but it did take a long time, so it's plausible. More importantly, ~ 4 seconds is much easier to wait for.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#23

Post by jraph » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:25 PM UTC

throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

If you're on Windows, WizTree ( https://diskanalyzer.com/ ) is great for figuring out what's consuming your storage space. On Linux/macOS you can use `du` from the command line (or ask an AI to make a convenience wrapper for you).

On Linux, ncdu is really good in the terminal. Filelight on KDE and Baobab on Gnome are really nice GUIs.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#24

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

throw2ih020 wrote: post #12

If you're on Windows, WizTree ( https://diskanalyzer.com/ ) is great for figuring out what's consuming your storage space. On Linux/macOS you can use `du` from the command line (or ask an AI to make a convenience wrapper for you).

I like erdtree or dust instead of du.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#25

Post by cadamsdotcom » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

Asked Claude to look at my full disk. Thought for 1 minute

It found 114GB of Hugging Face models, 17GB worth of models in an obscure app I tested once. In places I would've never thought to look.

I'd never have never found these myself.

Problem solved. For now!

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#26

Post by tim-tday » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

The problem with filling up a ssd is that it writes and rewrites the same blocks over and over defeating the built in wear leveling.

Filling an ssd creates the one situation where nand wear out is a problem.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#27

Post by zzo38computer » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

I have less than one terabyte of disk space, and less than 10% of the full capacity is in use, so it is closer to being empty. (The hard drives they sell have more capacity than I require.) And, there are files that I do not use (some of which come with the operating system, such as PulseAudio).

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#28

Post by shmeeed » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

RugnirViking wrote: post #11

throw2ih020 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one single video game I play that takes up around 650GB, so I have a dedicated drive for it. And between 1 and 2 TB of movies, TV, and photos. Everything else is ephemeral/scratch space for whatever I'm working on. I used to be into amateur movie making and editing, and back then I needed many TB of space for the stuff I pulled off my cameras before it got edited down.

What video game!? I've seen games that reach up to the already crazy number of 100gb, but I usually just don't install those, with few exceptions

I don't know what it is for GP, but in my case it's Flight Simulator 2020 with over 700 GB. Not the standard installation though: it's community mods, mostly photogrammetric data for additional realism. There's a whole ecosystem around the base game that could easily fill several TB if you go all in.

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#29

Post by Azantys » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #25

Asked Claude to look at my full disk. Thought for 1 minute It found 114GB of Hugging Face models, 17GB worth of models in an obscure app I tested once. In places I would've never thought to look. I'd never have never found these myself. Problem solved. For now!

Just looking with ncdu/du or another tool which sorts folders by size would have been much faster and easier, was there any need to use Claude here?

Re: Harddrive Is Probably Full

#30

Post by notorandit » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

... and It is ok.

I bought 16TB disk because I needed that much storage.

If I were using, say, only 10TB, I would be wasting 6TB.

I can expand my LVM as much as I can. But I definitely want my disk to be full. Same goes for my RAM.

And I want my CPU ide time to stay as close as possible to 0% and my load average as close as possible to my no. of CPUs.

Anything else would mean oversizing and overspending.