SharePoint minimum hardware requirements increase hard disk size

Every SharePoint environment I come across has the following Health Analyzer warning about drives running out of free space:

Title

Drives are at risk of running out of free space.

Severity

2 – Warning

Category

Availability

Explanation

Available drive space is less than five times the value of physical memory. This is dangerous because it does not provide enough room for a full memory dump with continued operation. It also could cause problems with the Virtual Memory swap file: (SERVERNAME – C:).

Remedy

Examine the failing servers and delete old logs or free space on the drives. For more information about this rule, see “http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=142688“.

Failing Servers

SERVERNAME

Failing Services

SPTimerService (SPTimerV4)

Rule Settings

View


This happens because without fail every customer is told to setup their server’s system hard drive as an 80 GB drive.
Microsoft recommends it and we know they are always spot on with their advice 😉

So why do we get the warning? Well let’s assume we are running a server with 16 GB of memory. 5 x 16 GB = 80 GB so we should be good, except the warning says we need 80 GB of available space. Last time I checked the operating system needed more than zero bytes, a heck of a lot more.

So let’s stop telling our customers that they need an 80 GB drive and start telling them they need a 160 GB drive which seems much more realistic, even for a server with 24 GB of RAM. When was the last time you skimped on the RAM or CPU cores? Never, but when it comes to the lowly hard drive 80 GB is plenty. NO IT IS NOT! Size matters. You have been warned [repeatedly].