I'm trying to up grade the os but I keep getting the startup disk is full I ordered more memory I was told this will not help. What do I do?

Question

I'm trying to up grade the os but I keep getting the startup disk is full I ordered more memory I was told this will not help. What do I do?

Answer 1

I think as drive capacities increase, the old 10-15% becomes less accurate.  The amount of free space you need doesn't really have anything to do with the drive size.  So, increasing your drive size shouldn't mean that you need to have more free GB (which using a % of drive space would mean).  You need free space to accommodate page outs (the amount of which would depend on how much RAM you have installed and how memory intensive the applications are), sleep images (again, this would max out at your total amount of RAM), and a bit to minimize fragmentation.
With desktop drives commonly in the 2TB range today, it is certainly not necessary to have 200GB+ free in order to maintain proper operation.  I generally find about 30GB to be the minimum I'm comfortable with.  Mind you, I pretty much always have way more than that available.  But, if I'm working on a system and the amount of free space is at least 30GB, I would generally not site drive space as the cause of any performance issues.  I'd say that 30GB is a minimum for a stable system (with 8GB or RAM installed).  Of course at that amount, you would still need to free up space if you were to want to install or download any significant amount of data.
With servers being more likely to run into the 16GB of RAM range, more storage would be necessary.  Most servers should be well stocked with storage, but the actual needs would vary greatly depending on what's being "served".
The 10-15% thing came about when we used to talk about drive capacities in hundreds of MBs and RAM in terms of KB (not MB and certainly not GB).  More drive space is always a good thing, but as drive capacities continue to sky rocket, we don't need to dedicate larger amounts of storage on systems with the same specifications.  A set amount of space is required for proper operation regardless of the capacity of the drive installed.