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I have a 1 TB drive and my OS resides on the first partition, which is 300 GB. I never use the other ~700 GB. Because of this, only the sectors corresponding to the first 300 GB are used. I have a very limited understanding of hard drives. Is it better for the HD to be used evenly across all the sectors of the 1 TB?

If the HD fails in the future, will it be likely due to the sectors in those first 300 GB partition?

If in fact the life of the HD can, on average, be extended if the usage is smoothed out across the entire HD, how should I go about doing that? Will extending the partition to fill the entire 1 TB help?

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If the HD fails in the future, will it be likely due to the sectors in those first 300 GB partition?

No. Failure will be more likely to be detected in that portion of the physical drive, but only because that is the portion of the drive that you are using. Failure can still happen in the unused portion, but since it isn't being used, you will never know unless you instruct the drive to run a full-drive surface scan and look at the results of that scan.

SSDs have a variant of this failure mode, however, because specific physical flash locations can only take a certain number of writes (with modern drives this amounts to a few thousand writes per physical flash location) before the flash memory wears out and can no longer accept further writes to that location. For this reason, SSDs employ (among other things) a technique called "wear leveling" that effectively moves data around to spread the writes across different physical locations. Wear leveling allows SSDs to have a significantly longer lifespan than they otherwise would, to the point that, in spite of what you might read elsewhere, flash failure is not a major concern with modern SSDs. This does not apply to rotational HDDs.

If in fact the life of the HD can, on average, be extended if the usage is smoothed out across the entire HD, how should I go about doing that? Will extending the partition to fill the entire 1 TB help?

No; even if HDDs benefited from some form of load smoothing, merely expanding the partition would not accomplish that if you aren't using the additional storage space. Since you would still be storing the same data on the drive, nothing would change except a single value (a few bytes) that tells the operating system how far the specific partition extends.

Also, with the data encoding used by modern hard disks, it doesn't really matter what is being stored in a particular location, because everything gets transformed to a jumble of (and I am simplifying here) "ones" and "zeroes" when written to the physical platter that actually holds the data. As an example, a large section of a file containing only zeroes is not written as a blank or all "zeroes" to the physical drive platter, because writing it like that would make it very much more difficult to read back reliably. The same goes for space that you aren't using at all and never have; it will appear to software as being (likely) all zeroes, but physically it is something very different.

TL;DR:

There is no reason whatsoever to be concerned because you aren't using the full capacity of the hard disk drive.

Whatever failure might happen would happen the same way regardless of whether you store only a few megabytes on the drive, or are using the whole drive.

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First off, my rant:

There is so much misinformation about hard drives out there, it makes me shake my head. Hard drives are not fragile pieces of equipment. They are designed to be used. While hard drives do fail, the rate of failure is extremely low. Not only that, hard drives have only gotten more robust every year. The reality is, your hard drive will probably outlast your desire to keep that computer, as well as your next two or three computers.

Secondly, even if you spread the volume across the entire drive, it would never use the outer edges, as the OS or defragmenters tries to compact the data closest to the faster inner tracks. You are perfectly fine limiting yourself to the 300GB volume.

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    "Hard drives are not fragile pieces of equipment." -- Yes they are; try dropping one while powered on (e.g. in a laptop). "...to the faster inner tracks." -- You have it backwards. See superuser.com/questions/643013/…
    – sawdust
    Aug 2, 2015 at 21:54
  • @sawdust I might have gotten it backwards, but hard drives are not fragile. They can take tremendous amounts of abuse. I have dropped powered hard drives, got them wet, put them under insane loads, you name it and they keep working. I have never owned a drive that has failed. I have almost kept every hard drive I have ever owned, some were 30 years old and 2 weeks ago I finally decided to dispose most of them, I spun them all up to see what was on them, and wiped them. Every single one, even 30 year old IDE drives still were in perfect working order.
    – Keltari
    Aug 2, 2015 at 22:25

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