Lol, I’m NEVER going to run that kind of stuff ever, let alone when the drive is full and for an extended period. This is my gaming, websurfing, movie machine. And pretty much that only since I don’t plan on streaming, editing, or creating content.
Sounds like you fall into the ‘normal user’ category. Just keep 10% free and you’ll be fine. Don’t sweat it if every-so-often free space drops to less than that for short periods of time. You’re not going to see any drive-related performance bottlenecks. Expect five years of trouble-free use. If you see the displayed capacity starting to go down, though, think about replacing the drive (or giving it non-critical duties). You bought a quality SSD — enjoy it.
Nice, thank you. Having learned all of this, I’ll replace my boot drive with an NvME when I start to notice this effect. Or whatever is good at the time. I’ll still keep this one until it implodes, mainly using it for games and other larger stuff, but I’ll move save files and game settings files to the backup/external at that point, just in case. :3
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any drive of any kind it is best to keep say 10-20% free if possible (this is outside of nand overprovisioning), in order for the OS to avoid fragmentation inside the filesystem, whether or not the underlying device has issues.
… and you may think “ssd = fragmentation doesn’t matter, there are no heads to move!” but it actually does (eventually). i’ve seen a drive (NTFS on a db server) “run out of space” because it was so fragmented (96-99%, lol) - there were free blocks (around a gig on a 60 gig disk from memory) but the space was so fragmented it couldn’t use them. Every fragment needs to be tracked, and that tracking takes up space (in the fat? inode table? depends on the filesystem and how it works - but those are of a limited quantity and you CAN run out on a filesystem).
if you are reading and writing a lot to a mostly full drive (of which most of it is static content), bear in mind that without it doing some sort of on-the-fly wear levelling (which it may do in the background - but while it is doing that, your performance will maybe tank a bit) you’re going to be hitting that last 10% of the NAND with all your writes (for "Working space). So you’ll be pushing those NAND cells a lot harder (the drive will only be able to free/re-use those 10% of cells) than if the writes were able to be spread over the entire drive. So potentially drive life could be affected. But unlikely you’re doing that much write.
That said, as above you’ll likely be fine. I’d (personally) try to keep 15-20% free for the above reasons, but 10% is a lot better than none, and it gets exponentially worse the closer you get to 100% full.
All drives exhibit this because of how write amplification works. When there are no free blocks to use things must be reshuffled around with read and rewrites of partially filled blocks. The less space you have the harder things are being shuffled around in the back ground to handle this load. So it just depends on a practical compromise, if you have the money, the ideal situation is to never fill your boot drive above half way to preserve its life, otherwise you have to accept the compromise that you are placing an extra load on the ssd to hold games you never play. The balance is yours to choose.
Btw this is why cheap ssd’s for games have some use, you can fill those to the brim with games and then because games won’t write much to the drive themselves so it doesn’t matter if its almost full. That being said they are all cheap these days, so just best to buy a decent brand regardless and reduce the hassle of failure.
@imperfectiousbeauty had her SSD 99.98% full one time.
On a 250 GiB drive she had only 22 MiB of free space. And I kid you not she did not even notice a difference in performance until a fateful notification popped up saying she was out of space and then was like, “oh”.
So yeah you won’t really even notice a performance hit until its basically completely full.
I’ve also mistaking made the mistake of not setting a timeout for my Suricata logs and one weekend a Chinese bot decided to flood my logs and the poor 8 GiB integrated flash storage was filled up. But it continued to operate for about a week without much issue. I just noticed one day that nodes on my network were randomly getting disconnected and taking forever to get a new IP address. And that I couldn’t log in to the web interface. so I had to clear it out the CLI. Boy was that a fun one haha.
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It takes a toll, my sister ran her ssd almost full, and even though she used it far less intensively than I do, no torrents no heavy desktop use, that ssd didn’t last as long, began to have issues stalling out on writes when mine was just fine.