How much hard disk free space?

My mini is used almost exclusively as a media "appliance", hooked up to a large flat panel TV. Installed on the mini itself is the operating system and little more. Attached to it are several (currently 4) large (1 TB) firewire hard drives crammed with movies and TV episodes (I have digitized my extensive DVD collection with Handbrake plus I have nearly stopped buying new DVDs in favor of downloading from iTunes).
My question is how much (what percentage) of these external drives needs to be left empty in order for them to operate with reasonable efficiency. They are virtually "read only" in that once I have uploaded a video file to them, it sits there until and unless I want to watch it (or unless I decide to download it to my MacBook and/or iPad to take with me for watching on trips).
I recall reading years ago that one should keep 10% or so of a hard disk free. Elsewhere, I read it should be as much as 20%. But it strikes me that that would mainly apply to a start-up drive that is constantly being read and written to, not a drive like mine that mainly just stores files and occasionally reads from them.
To re-emphasize, I keep much of my start-up drive free except what's required for the OS so the issue isn't that but just the external storage drives. I hate to waste as much as 400GB of space (100GB on each of four 1 TB drives).

I think your argument has some validity, but since you have a lot of time and effort invested in this project, I personally wouldn't try to cut things too close to the bone.
With drives of that size, I'm comfortable with the 10% rule; perhaps even 5%.
However, with the price of drives falling, perhaps gradually transitioning to larger capacity drives would be a good idea.
My understanding is that most modern drives dynamically re-allocate data from sectors that the drive controller senses are going to fail -- so having an adequate percentage of "wiggle room" makes sense to me.
"Wiggle room" may also come in handy if you ever need to rescue a drive using a utility like DiskWarrior, which needs space to rebuild directory structures.

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