How Much Free Disk Space Should I Have and How to Free up Disk?

How much free disk space should I have on a PC?

To let your PC work normally, there should be enough storage space on the hard drive. But how much space should you have? Actually, it depends. For better performance, you should leave about 20% free space on a hard drive or the PC will slow down; If you want to defrag efficiently, then, there should be at least 10% free space left. Once the hard disk is 80% full, you should consider them full. And under this circumstance, many problems including constant crashes, slow speed, and black screen may happen.

How to free up disk space for a PC?

As mentioned above, if there’s not enough space on a hard disk or it’s completely full, many issues could appear. So, how to effectively free up your hard disk? This time, you’ll learn about 3 practical ways to fix the insufficient hard disk space issue.

Option 1. Clean junk files

Over time, there could be a large number of junk files such as .tmp, cookies, and cache clogging your PC. So, when a hard disk is full, it’s pretty imperative to clear unnecessary files. Here, I recommend using the Windows built-in cleaner – Disk Cleanup – to free up some space.

1. Press "Windows + R", type "cleanmgr" in the popup box, and hit "OK".

2. Select a drive you want to clean and hit "OK".

3. Tick the files you want to clean and hit "OK".

4. Confirm the operation when asked.

5. Repeat the steps above to clean other drives.

Option 2. Turn on Storage Sense

Other than Disk Cleanup, Windows 10 has another built-in disk cleaner that’s called "Storage Sense". With it, you can clean many sorts of unnecessary files and meanwhile, you can schedule it to make it automatically work on a regular basis.

1. Go to "Settings > System > Storage".

2. Toggle Storage Sense on where the image shows.

3. Scroll down to the "Local Disk (C)" Section and choose any item you want to clean. Here, "Temporary Files" for example.

4. When scan completes, you can hit the "Remove files" button to delete those unimportant files.

5. Repeat the steps above to clean other drives and meanwhile, you can go to "Configure Storage Sense or run it now" to schedule the program.

Option 3. Move apps from the current disk to another without data loss

If neither Disk Cleanup nor Storage Sense helps free up enough space, maybe it’s time to turn to some other third-party utilities for help. This time, I recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional – a pretty much convenient and practical disk manager for Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11. With its app mover, you can easily move apps including video games and Microsoft Office from your current hard disk to another without data loss ( If you have more than 1 hard disk on your PC).

The question of "How much hard disk space do I need" won’t be so bothering once you come to this powerful AOMEI product as it’s very good at freeing up disk space. Now, download the demo to have a try!

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and then, go to "Free up > App Mover".

Step 2. Next, select the source drive where those apps are and click on "Next".

Step 3. Tick the apps you want to move, select a drive on another hard disk and hit the "Move" button.

Step 4. Confirm the operation when prompted and the app moving process will begin.

When it completes, click on "Finish".

How to replace the hard disk with a bigger SSD/HDD without data loss?

Instead of freeing up disk space, replacing your current hard disk with a bigger is worth considering when there’s not enough space. However, hard disk replacement usually means you have to reinstall all apps and programs on the previous hard disk to the new disk which is time-consuming. Don’t worry as you can use another feature – hard disk clone of this AOMEI product to copy all files from one hard disk to another without any loss.

Conclusion

How much free disk space should I have? As the question is hard to answer as it depends. However, you can always ensure there’s enough space on your hard disk by freeing it up with some practical tools like Disk Cleanup and Storage Sense. Meanwhile, the multifunctional utility – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional – is able to help move apps from one hard disk to another to free up very large space than the 2 Windows built-in tools. If you want to free up disk space on Servers, you can try the Server edition.