The deletion will only take place once it is purged from the recycle bin.  If it remains in the recycle bin, the document is not removed from the hard drive.

When you delete a file in Laserfiche, is the physical space on the hard drive immediately available for utilization for a new file to be written there?

The file on the volume isn't deleted immediately, it's done as a background job by the Laserfiche server.  As soon as the file is deleted the space it used to take up is available to store other data.

you must defrag the Hard Drive before this empty space (he called it White Space) is usable

This is not true.  A defragmentation process rearranges the way a disk's storage is used so that the blocks that hold the data for a particular file are brought closer together, and blocks that are not currently allocated to a file are all together.  The main purpose of this is to reduce the amount of seeking that a disk head has to do to read the data of a particular file - it's more efficient to read consecutive blocks than it is to seek around the disk.  Since it's just moving things around, there isn't any more usable space after the process than before.

SSDs work differently from spindle disks and essentially don't seek, which is why you don't defrag them.  Defragging requires low-level access to the disk, so you can't do it on systems like a SAN - at least not the same way you can on an attached hard drive.  If you have one of those, consult the documentation.

Good question. So from what I am reading, when a document is deleted and purged from the recycle bin, then that space is now available on the hard drive. Here is my question. What if it is a fixed size volume that is no longer being used? So lets say volume year 2010. The volume is fixed in size and no longer used because we are now in 2015. If a document gets purged from Laserfiche does that space become available? 

Hello everybody,

do you have any specific time delay for the deletion of the physical file from the disk?

I'm running out of space in the server and need to free space. I deleted from the Repository a lot of useless documents (also purged the Recycle bin), but the available space on disk is not immediately reflected. How long it takes?

I need this info to plan the scanning of new files in the same drive.

Thanks and regards,

Ignacio PdeA

BMB sal

I'd also like to know a time frame for this and if anything can be done to speed it up. Deleted close to 400 GB's of files and purged them yesterday and still have not recovered any space on the actual hard drive yet.