At what point will it crash?

[t-rex]

At what point will it crash?
installed a data base on a friends laptop with a 60g drive. used almost 42g. when i was done i checked for a free space percentage with defragmenter it was at 12%. i encouraged him to buy a larger drive but he balked claiming to buy a new one in a couple months. like i said we are friends have been for 20 years thats why i know he's not even going to look until that one crashes and burns. this is used in his bussiness w\o-l express, i reformatted it four weeks ago and he was worried about losing his gizzlion emails from customers. that said there will be much less free space soon.
so here's the question windows wants 15% free space to defrag. i am fairly certain there is a built in saftey factor, but crashes at what?

[Kyocera]

Probably more like a slow burn than a crash, things will stop working properly and will slow way down to a crawl.

He does not want a bigger drive because???? They are so cheap these days.

[hobbes]

Many third-party defraggers will work with much less free space than the Windows defragger. I use PerfectDisk, although it isn't free. If he doesn't want to buy a new drive he probably doesn't want to buy software to address it either. However, PerfectDisk does have a free demo, but I don't know if it is fully-featured.

http://www.raxco.com/products/PerfectDisk2k/

There are other programs that will work with less free space also, but I don't know if there are any free ones.

[christopher_wolf]

I recommend PerfectDisk too, but as Kyocera says, it is going to be a "slow burn." The more I/O ops, and thrashing along with it if it is a highly fragmented drive, the less the actual Mean Time Between Failures for the drive will be. If it is going to be used for a DB application, it would be best to schedule a rigorous defragmentation schedule for it to help reduce the inevitable decrease in operational lifespan it is going to encounter.

[t-rex]

thank's for the quick reply. when it slows down i'm going to steer him toward a usb external hard drive box off e-bay. the light bulb clicked on (idea)
back up for data and a new path for some the less used dual layer dvds.
and yes that is so right you can buy new drives from new egg cheaper than new oem drives w\o a warranty from ebay.
thanks again
t-rex