Your harddrive is probably full

你的硬盘可能已经满了

Posted: 2026-07-25 发布日期：2026年7月25日

I currently have 17 GB free space on my root drive, out of 0.47 TB usable space, that’s 3% free space. 我目前的根驱动器总可用空间为 0.47 TB，剩余空间仅为 17 GB，即只剩下 3% 的可用空间。

I also have an additional harddrive installed, 12 TB, it has 140 GB free, which may seem a lot but it’s actually only about 1%. 我还安装了另一块 12 TB 的硬盘，其中有 140 GB 的剩余空间。这看起来似乎很多，但实际上只占总容量的 1% 左右。

Your harddrive is probably pretty full too. Maybe not as crammed, but odds are it’s probably closer to full than empty. I ran a poll on mastodon and approximately half of the respondents, counting 81 people in total, had a harddrive that was more than 75% full. 你的硬盘可能也快满了。也许没这么拥挤，但很有可能它处于“接近满”而非“接近空”的状态。我在 Mastodon 上做了一项调查，在 81 名受访者中，大约有一半人的硬盘占用率超过了 75%。

Pretty much every time in my life I can think of, my storage has been pretty full, to the point where I’d have to regularly find and clean up files. 在我记忆中的大部分时间里，我的存储空间总是处于相当满的状态，以至于我不得不定期查找并清理文件。

I’ve doubled the amount of storage space I have many times, starting at I think 80 MB in the ’90s. Now I have tens of terabytes. They are still mostly occupied. 我曾多次将存储空间翻倍，从 90 年代的 80 MB 开始，到现在我已经拥有几十 TB 的空间。但它们依然大部分处于被占用状态。

Software exists for the task of identifying which files to delete when cleaning up your harddrive, and such software has existed for a long time. It may be an obvious statement, but this is a problem that people have and have had. 市面上一直有专门用于识别清理硬盘时应删除哪些文件的软件，这类工具存在已久。这听起来可能是一句废话，但它确实是人们过去和现在都在面临的问题。

Harddrives tend to be pretty full, regardless of how big they are, getting more storage even by several orders of magnitude doesn’t seem to fix this. 无论硬盘容量有多大，它们往往都会被填满。即使将存储空间增加几个数量级，似乎也无法解决这个问题。

Why is this? 这是为什么呢？

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. Then if we assume we mostly make random changes of state without thinking about storage, we should tend toward a full harddrive. 你可以用熵增理论来解释：硬盘“满”的状态组合远多于“空”的状态组合。如果我们假设人们在进行状态变更时大多是随机的，且不考虑存储空间，那么硬盘自然会趋向于被填满。

I don’t think this is wrong, but at the same it’s an incomplete explanation. 我不认为这个观点是错的，但它解释得并不完整。

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, and at the point it’s so irredeemably cluttered that when you do clean it up, you only have the patience to clean up enough to bide your time, judging the fate of every file on the harddrive is simply too much work. 问题的另一面在于：在磁盘被塞满到无法存入新东西之前，它都不会被视为一个问题。而到了那个地步，磁盘已经乱到无可救药，以至于当你清理时，你只有耐心清理出一点空间来应付燃眉之急——毕竟，去逐一判断硬盘上每个文件的去留实在太费劲了。

This is something pretty universal, and at the root of many paradoxes of technology, society, and life. 这是一种普遍现象，也是许多技术、社会和生活悖论的根源。

In software: 在软件领域：

We don’t optimize software until it’s too slow, so it tends to always be kinda slow. 我们不到软件运行缓慢时绝不优化，所以它往往总是显得有点慢。

We incur technical debt until working with the code is so painful we feel we must refactor it, or in less experienced developers, start over. Thus most codebases are pretty messy. 我们不断积累技术债，直到代码维护变得痛苦不堪，以至于我们觉得必须重构，或者（对于经验不足的开发者来说）干脆推倒重来。因此，大多数代码库都相当混乱。

Outside of software: 在软件之外：

We don’t expand road networks until they’re unbearably congested 我们不到道路拥堵到无法忍受时绝不扩建路网。

We don’t mind our diets until we have to buy bigger pants 我们不到必须买大一号裤子时绝不注意饮食。

I’ve gone from having a full time job, to being self-employed, and despite having no obligations and nobody to tell me what to do, I still feel just as busy, if not more so. My schedule seems to be another harddrive that is full. 我从全职工作转为自由职业，尽管没有了强制义务，也没有人对我发号施令，但我依然感到同样忙碌，甚至更甚。我的日程表似乎成了另一块被填满的硬盘。

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. 在大多数情况下，等到痛苦临界点才被迫面对问题，这比在过程中逐步解决问题要困难得多。

At the same time, premature optimization is seen as a bad thing. 与此同时，过早优化（Premature optimization）被视为一件坏事。

How can we reconcile these two facts? 我们该如何调和这两个事实呢？

The solution is perhaps to weaponize Jevons paradox and impose real constraints to optimize against, constraints that are smaller than the sum of all available resources. 解决方案或许是利用“杰文斯悖论”（Jevons paradox），主动施加真实的限制来进行优化，这些限制应小于所有可用资源的总和。

This is very obvious when we’re taking about personal finances, where we call it a “budget”, but repeatedly surprising elsewhere. 在个人理财中，这显而易见，我们称之为“预算”；但在其他领域，这却总是让人感到意外。

Let me tell you, if you deploy and dogfood your software on a raspberry pi, then it will be fast on a Threadripper too. If you can navigate a codebase in vim in an 80x25 terminal, then you can navigate it in a powerful modern IDE as well. 告诉你，如果你能在树莓派（Raspberry Pi）上部署并使用自己的软件，那么它在 Threadripper 处理器上运行起来一定会很快。如果你能在 80x25 的终端窗口里用 Vim 游刃有余地处理代码库，那么在强大的现代 IDE 中你也同样能做到。

Resources and capabilities are tricky. Intuition often sells the idea that they allow us to do more, but often they allow the same, but at greater cost. 资源和能力是很微妙的。直觉往往告诉我们，它们能让我们做得更多，但实际上，它们往往只是让我们以更高的成本完成了同样的事情。