Completely Full SSD - Does it degrade performance?

C

CopyCat

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jan 23, 2001
Messages
4,641
Hey Guys,

Pretty simple question. Back in the old days of regular hard drives it was a common practice to leave at least 15% of your drive empty for performance issues.
Do SSD drives need this same consideration?

I have a 32GB drive in my netbook and would like to fill it up with movies for a trip...say leaving 2GB free or so. Will this degrade my drives performance the same as it would a normal platter drive??

Thanks for any info.
 
Yes, but on an SSD to get inreased performance you would want to just partition off a smaller chunk (and feel free to fill that up). The reason SSD's slow down when they get full is different from regular hard-drives as it was fragmentation (and being at the slow end of the platter) where as with SSD's there is more wear leveling going on when you have less disk space which is what degrades performance on SSD's. The difference might not be worth setting back space though as the main difference is in writes.
 
Filling it up is going to slow down writes (but not really reads) because the controller has to make extra effort to clear space and write new information. However, your drive is eventually going to fill it up anyway, because of the wear leveling, whether you fill it up yourself, or whether the blocks are written with old deleted files. So technically saving a little bit of space might help you out for a brief while, but eventually you're going to take the speed hit anyway, at least until they come out with some better measures to prevent this, like the TRIM command.
 
Simple answer, YES. But for different reasons than for magnetic drives.

SSDs need some free space to move blocks to when writing new files. The manufacturers leave some space on the drives for this task, but if the drive is very full, it will still slow things down.

It is not because of file fragmentation like on magnetic drives.

Don
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top