about hard drive performance

[AmarSingh]

i think i read a while ago that as your hd fills up, it begins to slow down (performance suffers). Is this true? I have an 80gb seagate with 3 partitions (20,20,40) and i have 25gb free on all drives. (9,4,12) It seems to me that my drive is running slower, but i cant be sure since i filled it up pretty fast. I defragment very reguarly using diskeeper 7

 

[Geffy]

Your hard drive will slow down as it fills up as there will be less Virtual Memory or Pagefile Space. Also the last partion will be slower than the others as it is further out on the disk. The fastest access times will be for the First partition. Also NTFS creates an Overhead area for files so they can expand but not cause fragmentation, once the disk is filled to the end then these overhead ares will be written to which results in high fragmentation.