Description
This visualization shows how much space your computer’s system disk has free.
Real world impacts
If your computer system disk gets too full then finding big chunks of space for memory paging or for saving files can take a little long and slow things down. Very low free space can start to cause slowdowns in filesystem/disk throughput performance
If the system disk fills up completely then your computer will shutdown or crash. You will get lots of warnings on the screen before this happens though.
A lack of disk space can be either a “slow down” issue: your computer is working but just taking too long to do things – or a failure issue: your computer unexpectedly shuts down.
What to look for
This is a simple visualization – just look at the amount of disk space free and whether at any stage during the report you have been flirting with very low, or zero disk space free.
It is fine to be using your disk space but don’t use it all! If it is trending down over time (which would be usual as you will be creating more and more ‘stuff’ on the disk) then this visualisation allows you to see how fast it is being used up and you can predict when you might need to take some action to free up space in advance of it becoming an issue.
How do we test
Most computers keep a measure of their disk space – each type of computer (Windows, MaxOSX, Linux etc) do it a little differently.
We read these measures periodically and ‘normalise’ them to make them report the same measure across different machine types.
We then extract the basic disk free space measure and report that.
What could cause an unexpected lack of disk space
At the basic level, too much stuff stored on your disk.
Sometimes this is a normal thing whereby you have gradually used up all of your disk space.
Sometimes it is because you have suddenly made a change to your setup. Examples include:
- Connecting a cloud storage service like Dropbox or iCloud or OneDrive that has some existing files in it – often this is when someone shares a bunch of files, such as photos, with you.
- Connecting a phone or tablet to your computer and sync’ing it for the first time.
- Changing the settings on your phone or tablet which causes extra stuff to be sync’ed
- Downloading a bunch of stuff from the internet like music, movies or other files.
Next steps to diagnose or repair for Residential Trial Customers
Before doing anything you should make sure you have a good backup of your machine in case you mistakenly get rid of something important while trying to free up space.
Take a look at what is using up the space on your disk and decide if you can safely remove some unused files completely or move them to another disk, be that internal or external.
Look at your trash or recycle bin and see if you can free up space by emptying that.
Look at the temporary file locations used by the operating system and see if that can be cleaned up.
If you really cannot free up space then consider upgrading your disk space with a new and bigger disk, or perhaps a second internal or external disk drive.
Don’t just rush to buy a new computer because your disk is full – space can be found or created at a fraction of the price!
More visualization Overviews:
- TelcoSI: Excited space nerds
- Basic Network Measures Overview
- Basic Computer Measures Overview
- TelcoSI proxyNM: Home/Residential Setup, Information and Visualization Explainers.
- How to use this blog
- What else is available in the ‘Application Performance’ section of the report
- What does the stuff at the bottom of the PDF report (‘Report and agent information’) tell us
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- What are delay and latency
- Why do I see multiple service providers and/or IP addresses in my visualization