--- title: Your harddrive is probably full | daily.dev description: Hard drives tend to stay nearly full regardless of their size — a pattern that mirrors broader human behavior around resources. Using a Mastodon poll as a... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/your-harddrive-is-probably-full-uh7wofkq0 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Your harddrive is probably full | daily.dev og:description: Hard drives tend to stay nearly full regardless of their size — a pattern that mirrors broader human behavior around resources. Using a Mastodon poll as a... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/your-harddrive-is-probably-full-uh7wofkq0 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/uh7Wofkq0.png og:image:alt: Your harddrive is probably full og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Your harddrive is probably full **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Hard drives tend to stay nearly full regardless of their size — a pattern that mirrors broader human behavior around resources. Using a Mastodon poll as a starting point, the author observes that people rarely address storage (or any resource) until it becomes a crisis, leading to perpetually cluttered systems. The same dynamic applies to software: technical debt accumulates until it's painful, performance is only optimized when it's unbearable. The proposed solution is to impose artificial constraints smaller than available resources — like deploying on a Raspberry Pi to force efficiency — essentially weaponizing Jevons paradox to avoid the trap of expanding usage to fill whatever capacity exists. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 77 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-07-26). **TL;DR:** Commenters broadly agree that storage (and resources generally) tend to fill up due to accumulation habits and Parkinson's Law dynamics, with lively side-threads on disk analysis tools, Rust build artifacts, SSD performance at high utilization, and whether keeping drives full is even a problem. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 55% mixed · 25% skeptical **The case for** - Enforcing tight constraints early (e.g., cross-platform from day one, low-spec target hardware) eliminates whole classes of problems later. - Disk analysis tools like WizTree, ncdu, and dua make it easy to reclaim space quickly when needed. - Rust target directories are a surprisingly large and easy-to-delete source of reclaimed space. **The pushback** - SSDs suffer real performance degradation (write amplification, pSLC cache loss) when kept near full capacity. - Software silently accumulates large caches and data without user awareness, making it hard to manage storage intentionally. - Using AI agents (e.g., Claude) for trivial disk analysis tasks may reinforce carelessness rather than solving the underlying habit. **By community** - lobsters (mixed): Commenters engaged thoughtfully with the core thesis, sharing personal strategies (early discarding, cross-platform constraints, tmpfs) and connecting it to Parkinson's Law, but opinions on whether a full drive is a problem varied widely. - hackernews (mixed): Discussion fragmented into practical tool recommendations, specific storage culprits (Rust builds, HuggingFace models, games), and a technical debate about SSD wear and performance at high utilization, with some skepticism toward AI-assisted disk management. **Hottest debate:** Whether keeping a disk nearly full is actually harmful — some argue slack has real performance and reliability value, while others say modern hardware and LVM make it a non-issue. **Open questions** - Is there a principled way to distinguish data worth keeping from accumulation that should be discarded proactively? - Should operating systems provide better controls or visibility over software-generated storage consumption? **Highlights** > > In most of these cases, waiting until we’ve reached the pain point where we’re forced to confront the issue makes solving the problem a much bigger ordeal than if we’d addressed them along the way. This applies to writing cross-platform desktop software. I applied the following rule: *"I will always compile / run on Windows, Mac & Linux from the very first git commit."* It was a painful constraint. It also eliminated an entire class of customer support requests. I often see competitors claim they're cross-platform but only have Mac and Linux. Or maybe it's just Windows with UNIX targets promised for later. I witness their exhausting back-and-forth with users (always asking *"when Linux?"*) and I'm just over here breathing a sigh of relief! P.S. I still get *"BSD ports when?"* haha, but that's a manageable number. > — [abnercoimbre on lobsters · 6 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/wee5yh/your_harddrive_is_probably_full#c_yv0gzk) > This is a neat line of thought. My hard drive is definitely full. Currently sitting at 97% of my 1 TB. I have historically chalked this up to me wanting to keep more content. When I had a 256 GB hard drive, I could store X amount of content. When I upgraded to a 512 GB hard drive, I could store even more. Rinse and repeat. There will always be more repos to clone, songs to download, YouTube videos to save, movies to save. And file sizes keep getting larger as we go from 720p to 1080p to 4k. On top of that, games keep getting larger, to the point where I often need to uninstall a Steam game in order to install another. More and more content, at higher and higher fidelity. Is it as simple as that? We hold as much as we can in our basket, until we get a bigger basket. > — [jeaye on lobsters · 4 points, 1 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/wee5yh/your_harddrive_is_probably_full#c_3shloo) > When your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail. > — [tonyedgecombe on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055020) > Asked Claude to take a look. 114GB of Hugging Face models from experimenting, 17GB worth in an app called Draw Things; would've never found these myself. Took about 1 minute for it to do the analysis. The thing that makes me saddest is once it becomes common knowledge that you can just ask agents to do these things, everyone will likely get even more careless! Because the constraint these things work against is not free disk space, it's human patience. > — [cadamsdotcom on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051740) > When your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail. > — [tonyedgecombe on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055020) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/wee5yh/your_harddrive_is_probably_full) · 45 points · 16 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047449) · 33 points · 61 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat](https://daily.dev/posts/memory-is-running-out-and-so-are-excuses-for-software-bloat-kpqx7rtke) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [It's All Part 2 of the Process](https://daily.dev/posts/it-s-all-part-2-of-the-process-zxcz25eqb) · The Daily WTF · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get](https://daily.dev/posts/there-s-no-limit-to-how-bad-code-can-get-nsoryvawm) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [What Happens When a System Runs Out of Disk Space \(And Why It Breaks Everything\)](https://daily.dev/posts/what-happens-when-a-system-runs-out-of-disk-space-and-why-it-breaks-everything--3dgxt1rja) · Medium · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Things Software Developers Think They Don’t Need to Care about, But Can Impact Their Job](https://daily.dev/posts/things-software-developers-think-they-don-t-need-to-care-about-but-can-impact-their-job-0q5n22hvj) · InfoQ · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#performance](https://daily.dev/tags/performance), [#technical-debt](https://daily.dev/tags/technical-debt) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-harddrive-is-probably-full-uh7wofkq0) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Your harddrive is probably full","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/your-harddrive-is-probably-full-uh7wofkq0","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/your-harddrive-is-probably-full-uh7wofkq0"},"datePublished":"2026-07-25T20:10:48.879Z","dateModified":"2026-07-26T15:30:54.863Z","description":"Hard drives tend to stay nearly full regardless of their size — a pattern that mirrors broader human behavior around resources. 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