Your harddrive is probably full |<br>marginalia.nuYour harddrive is probably full<br>Posted: 2026-07-25<br>I currently have 17 GB free space on my root drive,<br>out of 0.47 TB usable space,<br>that’s 3% free space.<br>I also have an additional harddrive installed, 12 TB, it has 140 GB free,<br>which may seem a lot but it’s actually only about 1%.<br>Your harddrive is probably pretty full too.<br>Maybe not as crammed, but odds are it’s probably closer to full than empty.<br>I ran a poll on mastodon and approximately half of the respondents,<br>counting 81 people in total, had a harddrive that was more than 75% full.<br>Pretty much every time in my life I can think of,<br>my storage has been pretty full,<br>to the point where I’d have to regularly find and clean up files.<br>I’ve doubled the amount of storage space I have many times,<br>starting at I think 80 MB in the ’90s.<br>Now I have tens of terabytes.<br>They are still mostly occupied.<br>Software exists for the task of identifying which files to delete when cleaning up your harddrive,<br>and such software has existed for a long time.<br>It may be an obvious statement, but this is a problem that people have and have had.<br>Harddrives tend to be pretty full,<br>regardless of how big they are,<br>getting more storage even by several orders of magnitude doesn’t seem to fix this.<br>Why is this?<br>You can construct an entropic argument that there are simply more ways for a harddrive to be full than ways in which it can be empty.<br>Then if we assume we mostly make random changes of state without thinking about storage,<br>we should tend toward a full harddrive.<br>I don’t think this is wrong, but at the same it’s an incomplete explanation.<br>The other part of the equation is that a full disk isn’t a problem until it’s so full you can’t put more stuff on it,<br>and at the point it’s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up,<br>you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time,<br>judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work.<br>This is something pretty universal,<br>and at the root of many paradoxes of technology, society, and life.<br>In software:<br>We don’t optimize software until it’s too slow, so it tends to always be kinda slow.<br>We incur technical debt until working with the code is so painful we feel we must refactor it,<br>or in less experienced developers,<br>start over. Thus most codebases are pretty messy.<br>Outside of software:<br>We don’t expand road networks until they’re unbearably congested<br>We don’t mind our diets until we have to buy bigger pants<br>I’ve gone from having a full time job, to being self-employed,<br>and despite having no obligations and nobody to tell me what to do,<br>I still feel just as busy, if not more so. My schedule seems to be another harddrive that is full.<br>In most of these cases,<br>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.<br>At the same time,<br>premature optimization is seen as a bad thing.<br>How can we reconcile these two facts?<br>The solution is perhaps to weaponize Jevons paradox and impose real constraints to optimize against,<br>constraints that are smaller than the sum of all available resources.<br>This is very obvious when we’re taking about personal finances, where we call it a “budget”, but repeatedly surprising elsewhere.<br>Let me tell you, if you deploy and dogfood your software on a raspberry pi,<br>then it will be fast on a Threadripper too. If you can navigate a codebase in vim in an 80x25 terminal,<br>then you can navigate it in a powerful modern IDE as well.<br>Resources and capabilities are tricky.<br>Intuition often sells the idea that they allow us to do more,<br>but often they allow the same, but at greater cost.