Yo guys, I’ve got my recently built rig running off a single 1tb SSD, and almost immediately downloaded a shitload of games, most of which, I haven’t played yet.
So far I’ve kept it under 75% utilization because I heard that going above that slowed them down. The question I have is how much, and what other negative effects are there to maxing out (or even just using a lot of) the storage capacity on an SSD?
I believe it depends on how your SSD does caching. If it does caching in a certain way, when your SSD is close to max capacity, the performance of the drive will tank.
I’ll have to read up on it again.
What’s your SSD?
Samsung 860 EVO 2.5" Sata 3. If it’s one of the ones that exhibits this, what is a safe capacity level to avoid performance drops, and how bad CAN the performance even drop? Lower than HDD levels?
this usually isn’t a massive problem on samsung drives, try to atleast keep 5-10% of the drive free tho since it uses unused space for caching when it shuffles data around
10% ? I can live with that. Gives me room to put GTA V, and WD1 on there since I recently bought those.
Half a GB cache.
Most SSDs have excess, unreported capacity for wear-leveling.
Most of the “approaching full” issues I’ve ever had aren’t related to storage but filesystems.
Ext4 and NTFS both choke pretty hard when full.
And then after that it has the mlc cache.
What is this?
Yeah, C drive reports as 265gb free of 930gb On a 1tb marketed drive.
SSDs will wear out faster the more they’re filled as well. General rule is 10-15% should be free so data can be shuffled around and wear leveling can work without impacting TDW and performance
Good old number juggling. The way the hard drive maker counts and the way the PC counts are not the same which leads to a seemingly “missing” 70gb.
https://tierradatarecovery.co.uk/why-does-my-1tb-hard-drive-offer-only-931gb-of-space/
If it’s similar to 840 Pro - keep 10% of space not partitioned. If using Windows - install Samsung Magician, iirc it has some hints and tweaks regarding wear and performance.
I understood that there was some weirdness around it. I was just posting both numbers for you guys’ sake.
Isn’t it too late to ‘not partition’? Or is just not using that space good enough?
Ah cool, well there is another random factiod thing for you to remember.
You can resize the partition. Even if it’s a system drive, you can always boot from LiveCD/USB and resize the partition from there. Unless it’s ReFS, not sure if it’s supported by, say, gparted. Should be, considering it’s what, 5-6 years old now?
Due to the way mapping is implemented on Samsung’s SSD controllers, wear-levelling works regardless of how empty blocks are kept empty. Just ‘not using all the space’ is as good as partitioning it. The only advantage of partitioning is that it prevents you from accidentally filling up your drive — it protects you from yourself.
Assuming your usage pattern is relatively ‘normal’, keeping an 860 Evo 10% empty should let it see out the 5-year warranty period without breaking a sweat. If you leave 20% empty then 7–8 years shouldn’t be a drama either. Due to severely-diminishing returns there’s little point keeping any larger amount empty for wear-levelling purposes.
If you always keep ≥10% empty you’ll see the available room on the drive shrink before you notice any performance drops. When the displayed capacity starts getting smaller, that’s your signal to replace the drive. If you use the partition approach, then this signal is suppressed until a good chunk of the drive has already failed.
I’ve got a 1TB 860 Evo SATA and a 1TB 960 Evo NVMe and I just leave 20% free because I want the drives to last 7 years. No partitions are dedicated to wear-levelling.
So I have a little more space to work with, then. Will wear leveling be effected if I ‘overfill’ it, but then delete that data? ((Since deleting data doesn’t really delete it, it just marks it as empty space))
Occasionally breaching the 10/20% empty rule won’t impact the lifespan of an 860 Evo to any extent that you will notice.
What you want to avoid is filling up the drive and then doing something that initiates a whole pile of ‘random’ and scattered disk activity. Virtual machines and databases tend to generate that sort of activity, so don’t fill up to 97% and then run VMs/DBs for a week solid — that would be bad.