Seeing HD space left?
 

hey guys just a quick and simple question .... how do i go about seeing how much room i have left on my HD under Slack?
Cheers in advanced
:)

From a console, type:

df -h

This will show how much space is used/available on all your currently mounted partitions. Check out the manpage for df for more info.

wow in under a minute my questions was answered! thanks a lot mate

**edit now i see why my computer is running slow ... 2.8GB outta 2.7 used lol .. oh well time to dig around for another HD!

PPS one more thing while i am here. .. if i install another small HD .. how can i install my packages on there? rather than on the main driver where linux is installed?

Glad to help :)

Having a full hard drive should have no effect on the performance of your computer, though. If things are running slow, it's because too many programs are running, or they're using too many resources. You might want to try disabling services you don't use, uninstalling programs you don't use, backing up those mp3s or whatever before worrying about installing a new hard drive.

As for installing programs to a new disk - you can devote the entire drive to /usr, for example, and modify your /etc/fstab to use the new drive's partition instead of your existing /usr partition. Of course, you should copy all the existing stuff you have in /usr over to the new drive. You could also use the new drive for some other portion of your filesystem hierarchy, and copy old stuff off your other drive to make more room on it. There are lots of ways to do it; it all kind of depends on what's using up all the space!

Along these lines, to find the amount of space your current directory is using, run: du -s (disk usage -summary)

wapcaplet - your post is spot-on but I will disagree slightly with your comment that a full HD will not affect performance. For the most part this is entirely true but in my experience if the amount of free space gets below say 5% or so, it would not be unexpected to see a degradation in performance. It's sort of like traffic on the freeway - things are cool up until usage starts approaching capacity, and then throughput will decline disporportionately, ie, once you reach 90% of capacity, adding another 5% load will probably cause a 15% decline in throughput rather than the (linear) 5% decline.

Am I misreading your post? I'll admit this is not my area of expertise but intuitively it makes sense that if drives get nearly full, their performance will suffer. Any feedback is welcome -- J.W.

J.W. - good point. I don't know whether I've personally gotten a drive that full, but it does make sense that it'd see some problems when it's nearly full, especially if there are programs that are altering its contents frequently. Might also affect the swap performance, if he's using a swap file. Not my area of expertise either, so I do not know for sure.