Quick Question About SSDs

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thickneckwins

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Dec 23, 2014
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I have a SSD (128 GB) in my computer as well as a regular hard drive (1 TB). I of course have my operating system installed on the SSD and I try to install as many games as I can on it to decrease load times. However, it being only 128 GB I can only have a limited amount of games on it as you can imagine. Currently it's about 95% full with only around 5 GB of space left and it's been that way for awhile. I've been installing new games on my regular hard drive.

On to my question - I read recently that it's bad to have your SSD filled by more than around 80% or it will slow down. I was wondering if this was true? If it is indeed true, have I damaged my SSD in anyway by keeping it so filled up for so long or can I just delete some of the things on it to make it return to its normal, fast speed when it's less than 80% full?
 
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Solandri
On to my question - I read recently that it's bad to have your SSD filled by more than around 80% or it will slow down. I was wondering if this was true?
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It's true, though how much it impacts you depends on how you use the drive. If you don't write new files to it (and the OS isn't swapping memory pages), then it won't impact you at all.

RAM and magnetic media have two memory states - 0 or 1. You can overwrite a 1 with 0, or a 0 with a 1.

Flash has three memory states - 0, 1, and erased. To go from 0 to 1, you actually have to go 0 -> erased -> 1. If you're an electrical engineer, it's basically a EEPROM.

Here's the catch. The erased -> 0 and erased -> 1 operations are really fast (the write speed of the SSD). The 0 ->...
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IInuyasha74

IInuyasha74

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I don't believe that true at all. While its possible to happen with conventional HDDs, as there is a need to make more passes of the disk to find empty sections. For SSDs this does not really happen cause it always knows what is free and what is not and can write right away.

It could cause more damage to your SSD is true, while its not really outside normal operation, those free blocks will be written too much more causing your SSD to fail when these blocks fail, and most of the other blocks are empty. Its a reliability concern for sure.

Deleting items won't change speed, but should improve the life span. You can also enable NTFS compression, which on my SSD and HDDs saves about 20% of the space. It is thought this might decrease life span a little of SSDs and lower performance but I haven't noticed anything noticeable in drops of speed and the performance hit is probably minimal.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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On to my question - I read recently that it's bad to have your SSD filled by more than around 80% or it will slow down. I was wondering if this was true?
Click to expand...
It's true, though how much it impacts you depends on how you use the drive. If you don't write new files to it (and the OS isn't swapping memory pages), then it won't impact you at all.

RAM and magnetic media have two memory states - 0 or 1. You can overwrite a 1 with 0, or a 0 with a 1.

Flash has three memory states - 0, 1, and erased. To go from 0 to 1, you actually have to go 0 -> erased -> 1. If you're an electrical engineer, it's basically a EEPROM.

Here's the catch. The erased -> 0 and erased -> 1 operations are really fast (the write speed of the SSD). The 0 -> erased and 1 -> erased operations are really slow. So what the drive does is during idle time, it gets busy converting all the 0s and 1s you've deleted into erased memory. That way when you actually do write a new file, all that space is already in the erased state, ready to be converted to 0 and 1 at blazing speed. (It's not just data you delete. The wear leveling algorithm will move data around without you knowing it, essentially copying it and deleting the original. So your drive is always created deleted memory cells.)

So if you've got 25 GB free on the SSD, then it's got a pretty good buffer. You might be able to write, say, 20 GB before you start to run into unerased memory cells and the writes drastically slow down. But if you've only got 5 GB free, then you'll hit that threshold after just 3-4 GB. And the slow writes will happen a lot quicker as the drive is forced to slowly erase cells before it can write new data.

If you don't write much data to the drive, then this won't impact you much. And no it won't damage your drive. Worst case the wear leveling algorithm will keep your drive in a constant state of erasing all free memory cells as it moves stuff around, and the SSD's write speed will be like molasses.
 
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