Outsourcing files on hdd

[Nightfury]

I use a pretty small SSD and a big HDD in my PC

If I remember right, data is stored in little "gaps" (if you call it this way) on the disk's and if new data is overwriting the old files, they are just stored on a different place on the disk (please correct me if I'm wrong), so at some time the place is being used up and the HDD is coming "to it's end of life".

So my question is, if i use a big outsourcing file on the HDD, does it's lifespan decrease faster than normal? I would think so because there are many files that are writen onto the disks and then after use in an application they are not being touched any more...

I don't know if this is the right forum for that, but maybe somebody could give me some answers 

[Geonovast]

I'm somewhat limited on the subject, and I know it depends on what OS and filesystem you're using.

But from what I understand about what you're getting at:

When you delete something, it isn't deleted.  It is marked ok to be overwritten, if needed.  The space can be re-used if it is needed, and it will not show up as taking up space on your drive. 

So if you have a 1 TB drive, it won't be at "end of life" once you've written 1 TB to it.  It can just store 1 TB at a time, but the sectors can be overwritten many many times.  AFAIK re-writes don't affect the life of a standard magnetic platen drive.  They do affect SSDs however.

There are utilities to analyze the health of your HDD.  If you're on Windows, there's Crystal Disk Info, which will pull the SMART data and give it an overall health check.

I have no idea what you mean by an outsourcing file.

[0111narwhalz]

You may also find utility in defragmentation, which takes the files that have been squeezed into the gaps between many other different files and moves them to a continuous region. This improves seek and read/write speeds because a single file doesn't need to be sought multiple times.

As for the "outsourcing file," I think you mean a paging file? A paging file is used after the RAM fills and is best placed on your fastest drive (here, the SSD) for performance. Paging may degrade SSDs faster than expected, though, so keep that in mind.
If you don't mean a paging file… I guess maybe temp files? Kinda the same story as the paging file. Though temp files can be big and you should consider this.

[Geonovast]

Ah yeah, I hadn't even thought about that possibly meaning the paging file.

If your paging file is getting so big that you're worried about HDD degradation, the first thing you should do is upgrade your RAM.  You should also be able to set a max page file size.

[YNM]

Just defragment your disk I guess ?

[Nightfury]

20 hours ago, 0111narwhalz said:

As for the "outsourcing file," I think you mean a paging file?

Yeah, exactly. Didn't found a proper translation

20 hours ago, Geonovast said:

the first thing you should do is upgrade your RAM

Have thought of that for a while, but I have a overall not so good system , so I should wait for a better one...

20 hours ago, Geonovast said:

You should also be able to set a max page file size.

Will try that

 

20 hours ago, Geonovast said:

So if you have a 1 TB drive, it won't be at "end of life" once you've written 1 TB to it.  It can just store 1 TB at a time, but the sectors can be overwritten many many times.  AFAIK re-writes don't affect the life of a standard magnetic platen drive.

Didn't know that, thank's for help in this point