How full can your SSD be?

Yo guys, me again hum I've been doing some research now and I would like to know how much of my available 119GB can I actually fill without decreasing performance?
The reason I'd like to know is with 3 games installed right now (including 22GB FSX and possibly 20GB il2 UP3 later on), I have 58GB left on my C drive.
So does this start slowing down the machine? or do I "need" to fill it more (until 40Gb left,30, 20?) so that the SSD starts slowing down?
Thanks for your time and future help

 

I have heard not exceed 90% capacity, but I don't know why. Probably something with TRIM.

 

I would keep the bare minimum at 80%, 50% if possible. The more free space you have, the easier it is for garbage collection (i.e. TRIM) to work faster.

 

I did some research, in this research it warned not to load it too much in deed because trim was severly affected and something as trivial as opening (reading) then rearranging used files in the SSD (wright) would be tripled unnecessarily... the operation could thus reduce the lifespan of the drive, and its performance.

Thank you for your answer. can anyone else co-sign what he just said?

 

What are those values? free space? or used space? thank you for your time

 

Used space, not free space , i aim for 50% myself, but i'm being conservative.

 

All right, so 80% used space, though not pretty, would not affect performance too much ?

 

There will be a decrease in performance, but it won't slow down your write speeds to a crawl. Note that your read speeds will remain largely unaffected.

 

Stampy, depends on your usage of your storage subsystem.

With anything over 30% filled, I can feel the SSD slow down (maybe 3-5%?).

With anything over 50% filled, I feel that I am operating in mechanical HDD speeds. (And I feel ill thinking that I paid SSD prices to achieve this 'pinnacle'!).

But, keep in mind that I can generate a couple of TB's of data in one sitting too and I'm super sensitive to how my system performs.

The best way to limit yourself is by going to Disk Management (right click Computer, Manage, Disk Management) and Shrinking the partition to as small as you can make it while leaving about 15GB free space on the drive (right click on the C: partition).

The beauty of this method is that if you really need more space (even the maximum your HDD/SSD can give you), all you need to do is Extend the partition you just shrunk. But the benefit is a much more consistent storage subsystem performance (and even for a HDD, more 'snap' for the O/S too) from your SSD as it now has dedicated nand chips free to do TRIM or GC as it sees fit. In my experience much better than simply leaving the free space on the drive (and remembering to not overfill it with each project that comes along).

Good luck.

 

Where you guys getting this information from? I've filled my 60GB drive up to 1GB/500mb free left, and it did still work fine, without any noticable slow downs. I have also posted a benchmark here on NBR, and many went like "wow, how can your drive still operate so fast" etc. etc.

However.

 

tunay, I get my information from actually trying to use the SSD's as 'normal' system drives.

I can download a few hundred GB's of RAW photo's each day and proceed to output them at wall sized resolutions (@ 300dpi). In addition to stitching a few (50 or so) together for panorama's that I sometimes need to output even larger.

Doing this a few times on 'puny' sized SSD's taught me my lesson: they need to be treated with kid gloves (my HDD's don't react like that, after all...). At less than 50% filled (formatted, btw - so on a 250GB Intel 510 SSD, I am only using 100GB of the SSD), the performance of the SSD stays consistently high (almost as when I first installed it).

It is not enough to simply fill the SSD (once/twice/etc.) it is to also need to use it (hard) too daily, that I find slows them down (and we're already at a performance hit when we start with a small capacity version vs. a model with all the controller/nand channels properly filled).

 

Well, i believe it is a YMMV kind of thing, after all, only the write speeds will be affected so anything that isn't too write intensive probably won't be affected. In the end it will depend on usage, there will be a decrease in speeds, but we're not necessarily talking something drastic unless you need to write a lot of data frequently to the drive. It will still feel better than a non-optimized good mech HDD using tiller's method, i haven't tried tiller's partitioning scheme because i mostly run on SSDs now and i'm feeling too lazy to reinstall the OS on my N50 as i did a clean install on my desktop in august and one on my g73 in september. Besides, it is a standard momentus drive in the N50 instead of a high performance drive liek the 7K750 or the scorpio black.

 

What you're saying is, installations slow down, but software use (ie Starcraft II or FSX) is not noticeably affected? Anyways thank you for that answer

I feel I shouldn't dare try to do that, I wouldn't feel too confortable going through all that. But you know what I'll ask my dad what he thinks about that and maybe will get to that if like his answer so Thank you for bringing all that.
As for your feel of having a mechanical HDD... I wouldn't know what to say here... mine is filled at 51% without any noticeable, or striking change of performance. Maybe I just don't want to see a change though?! xD

Okay! good to know I will not dare filling mine up that much. though I will think about filling my C drive up to but not including 71% (EXACTLY AIIIIGHT !!!) Naaaa but seriously no more than the mid 70s%
Okay I'll keep in touch with this thread here thanks for your feedback I feel better already!

 

All right that's much more feedback than I expected from this thread thank you for the info.
But for my use of the C drive, what would you guys think? I basically install OS, all the needed programs (java, directX, drivers, mozilla vlc etc...) and video games, then ZIP I don't touch it.
I don't think I use programs that are anywhere as hardcore or demanding like yours. So knowing all this would I (John Smith user) actually notice a decrease of performance ?
Thank you all once again! (Maybe I should put a thanks in my freaking signature all ready!)

 

Software will be affected, but things like video encoding will be more affected than said word editing, it depends on how much writes operations are done by the software.

 

Nothing to 'dare'! Try it. As I mentioned, if you really need more space, simply Extend it back to how it was.

A properly maintained HDD gives me equivalent performance of an SSD (plus the bonus of the added capacity, of course) except when editing in LR and scrolling fast through images and/or applying NR to multiple images at once. The system still comes to a crawl, but it is a faster crawl than with a HDD.

If you want more advice/guidance, please ask.

 

I'm pretty sure this actually changes from each drive, but then again, do you really think Stampy is going to use his drive this way? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying information aboe isin't true, but there are diffrent kin of users. And, I would list you as poweruser while I'll list Stampy under catagory basic/daily user. That's simply because he's planning on installing a game and then just play it. Not download 100GB of data each day on a 250 GB drive and just rewrite it, rewrite it and rewrite it.

For my normal use, I had about 1GB free space left, and did use it like that for almost a year without any issue.

 

tunay, I agree I'm not a normal user.

What I am also basing my comments on is people who I have replaced their HDD's and have seen them stunned at how little they notice the 'faster' speeds of their super expensive SSD's.

For myself, as stated, when I drop $600 on an SSD, I want to ensure that I am getting the performance I paid for - even if it means getting to use only half the capacity to get that (more consistent) performance.

 

Seriously? SSD, were my best upgrade, 2 years ago I've noticed an extreme diffrence.

I'm not running on a SSD drive now, but as soon as I get my ACER up and running again (signature) I'll buy one. Love the way it saves the extra heat, love the last minutes of battery, and the most important thing, the noice. My ACER idles down to 25C an the shut the fans off, from there on, it is like a little baby sleeping. And I just love it

 

Oh yeah, there are other benefits to SSD's, for sure!

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7766632-post2079.html


I too am amazed by my little U30Jc @ 8GB RAM + Intel 320 160GB SSD for the battery life it offers.

 

I have a similar storage setup to the OP, and the only time I install anything to my primary drive is when it's very small. Games and many other apps are installed on my secondary HDD. Yes, loading times for those apps aren't quite as fast, but I don't really see a decrease in actual gaming performance.

 

Unless you use a high perf mechanical with a partitioning scheme for performance, the difference between SSD and HDD will be quite noticeable, at least in my experience. Also it's not something you notice often, you don't tell yourself everyday hey my systems feels much more responsive, switch back to a HDD though and you'll notice that the system fells sluggish.

 

That is awesome actually! I wonder if there however is any diffrence between 4 and 8GB RAM when it is about battery saving. I'm exited like 8 year old kid to get my ACER running again! And, as you said, I'm not 'babying' my battery, but my whole laptop! I have used more then 600 USD on my laptop, in last two months. It is not because I don't can't afford to another system, but because I just love my laptop.. Call me crazy.

 

You're not crazy, if the system works well for your usage and you like, why change it if you can fine tune it. Besides, it's not like the SSD is wasted if you change laptops. RAM consumes little power so i wouldn't worry too much about that.

 

It does, but then again, for 600-700 USD I could get a pretty good new generation system. Next on my upgrade list is a 120 HZ LED LCD panel, if I can find one and get it to work. New SSD drive, new RAM modules. Oh and I want a new bag

If I recall correctly, there was someone who actually saw diffrence but then again, even I can't remember where I've saw it. Then again, I wonder how it would be 1 stick vs. 2 sticks.

 

Exactly. So from what has been said, it means I shouldn't get a very noticeable decreaase in performance... So I think I'll just load it up to 70%

That's because, like you said, it affect the loading of the game. It will be slower on your HDD to LOAD. FPS wise there will be no difference .
But the thing is I installed games on HDDs for too long xD (original x305 came with a 64GB SSD.... a 40GB windows vista.......... and only 48.5GB usable!!!!!!! The recovery partition was on the 64GB SSD ....and was taking 10GB out of the equation!! ).
So I bought a bigger SSD... to install my favorite games on it.

 

I've seen in other threads that in some SSD drives, you can change the amount of space used for over-provisioning.

This is all theoretical, as it wouldn't be practical, but I wonder in tiller's case, if a large sized SSD was configured with something like 200 - 300GB for over-provisioning, if the performance problems would disappear.

 

All drives when nearing capacity filled slow down. And the ones I have seen
HDD's if filled to the brim--go to the after life--they are dead as door nail !

SSD's being a RAM Chip may be able to shake it off with an erase,,, My SSD is 29% filled and no slow downs at all..

Cheers
3Fees

 

-------------- HERE IT IS --------------------

I confused why most people buy EXPENSIVE SSD and treat it like a garage queen / a new girlfriend - e.g. keep minimum 50% free, scared to write large data in the SSD.

FYI: I have Intel SSD 320 160GB. I use it to store my pictures, videos, documents, and lots of times, it's left with 5%-10% available before I transfer to my external.

1. It is still running fast with 5% capacity available. At least that's what I feel. Maybe it's slower (I don't notice it), but it's way way way faster than mechanical disk drive.

2. Don't worry too much with writing large data in the SSD. Your SSD should be able to handle more than you imagine. Unless, you use it in extremely busy server. For personal use video editing, picture editing, store movie, pics, etc (like what I do), 200% - the SSD will be fine.

I cannot reiterate this enough. But the point is: DON'T hesitate to use your SSD at its maximum capacity. You pay the premium for this!

 

It's not a question of file size written to the SSD, it is purely related to GC and free space. Even with TRIM, the lower the free space, the longer garbage collection takes. Now this doesn't affect the reads, only the writes on the SSD. If you are doing write intensive tasks on a near full SSD, the performance can decrease to easily noticeable levels. Your SSD will still perform faster than a HDD though.

Regarding to writing large files, if you write lots of large files to the drive then delete them, GC won't keep up as well and the drive will behave as a nearly full one since the pages on the NAND won't have ben reset before you write new data to the drive. That is why it's not a good idea to use 1000MB file benchmarks on a SSD and run the benchmark often.

 

I would use the SSD to the max and see what happens.
Nobody knows when GC really kicks in and how TRIM is implemented in the firmware of any SSD.

 

Yeah, no one knows, but people who tested did notice that even with TRIM, GC couldn't keep up if you went crazy with the writes on a large scale or on an almost full drive. How much the performance drop will affect you depends on your usage patterns. There is a reason manufacturers over provision their drives as well, Intel does this so even if your SSD is full, there is actually some more space that is hidden from the OS, but that the controller can use.

If i recall correctly, SSDs meant for server work have more over provisioned space on top of having better NAND because server work is write intensive.

 

You may have valid points (for your usage style).

However, I come for the opposite side of this issue.

Buying $600 SSD's and watching them perform worse than HDD's or even USB keys was painful to see - and this slowdown was noticed while I was still setting up the systems for use (still installing programs) - I hadn't even started 'hammering' them with my multi-GB's writes that my work demands from my storage subsystems. These early SSD's were returned before the return period expired (thankfully).

A few months/year? later, I tried again with a $400 drive - this time with higher capacity and even cheaper while supposedly being part of the 'gen 2' SSD's. This drive fooled me (Patriot Inferno 100GB). It worked at least as good as my HDD's... until the return period passed. Then, in two weeks time writing something like 3TB's to the drive it was slower than my Hitachi 7K500 500GB drive in the same scenarios.

Understand that this drive has 128GB of nand onboard - 28% over-provisioned - and it still performed worse than a 4200 RPM drive from a decade ago.

I kept this drive as a $400 USB 'key' in an external enclosure for a while - then sold it as-is (for peanuts).

Now, a few months later - I played with a half dozen SSD's, in real world use and the best balance I could find is what I have already recommended (and keep recommending); buy a 160GB - 250GB SSD and use 100GB or less of it (I just pretend I don't have the rest of the capacity). Why 160GB or more? Because this capacity is what ensures that all the controller's channels are utilized and that the nand is interleaved (think RAID0) optimally too on each channel for the highest performance possible.

This setup is what gives me the speed of the SSD (which I paid big $$$ for) and it gives it to me no matter what I do to the system.

At this point in time, this is how I protect my SSD 'investment' - I don't buy them for anything else, except for the speed that they offer during my photo editing sessions. If they drop below that speed, I just have a very expensive toy - and that is what they would be if I used them at full capacity as you suggest.

Now, realizing that not everyone (or most likely almost no one else) uses a storage subsystem like I can and do, the best compromise is somewhere in the middle - but if speed is what you buy an SSD for, then filling it past 30-50% will slow it down in my experience (depending on the SSD we're talking about) - no matter if you can notice it or not.

So, even though I use much less than 50% of my SSD's capacity, it is still not treated like a queen or a new girlfriend - it is not babied at all - it is simply setup properly to take any punishment I can throw at it.

Cheers!

 

both points are valid, we just want to maximize the return(in terms of total write/s as that is what translated into work done thus $$$) of your SSD.

 

Yes, FusionIO has options to use 10% of the size

 

If you buy them only for the reason of better performance for photo editing, that's your own thing.
But the main other buyer of a SSD do not.

 

I buy them for that usage because that is what I do - if I don't take the steps outlined previously to keep that performance as high as possible, then anything else that is affected by the storage subsystem is also negatively affected (by a huge amount - as stated: to below HDD levels).

The other major benefits of an SSD is greatly mitigated by a properly and optimally setup (modern) HDD as I've stated many times before.

Succinctly: an SSD mostly offers a system more 'snap' - it does very, very little to actually increase the core performance that the CPU/RAM/GPU/PLATFORM combo that determines the core performance any system is capable of. Except in certain scenarios like my (database) driven LR editing, PDF creation/editing and multi-track sound editing (real-time) usage models. There are of course the commercial (Server) workloads that SSD's also benefit, but I'm just concerned here with the more workstation type uses.

If people aren't buying them for the performance increase they offer, what else are they buying them for? If simply for the 'snap' they offer: they're spending money (and likely suffering from the small capacities) needlessly when much better options like the XT Hybrid drive exists.

Of course, spending money needlessly is not a crime - as long as its yours to spend.

The crime is putting these solid state devices up on a pedestal and giving them attributes that they simply don't have nor have earned. (And pushing these views onto others).

 

for me, it is the no moving parts, battery usage thus less heat thus fan noise reduction, weight, performance in read, performance in write.

in that order.

 

One of the biggest advantages an SSD has over HDDs and a determining factor for me in buying them is for their shock/vibration resistance or 'no moving parts' as chimp mentioned.

I wouldn't mention how I managed to ruin my Momentus XT HDD but I can tell you no HDDs' resistance could ever match up to an SSD drive. That cannot be overlooked at all. That and performance are the two big keys for me.

I wouldn't even mind if it would suck away battery life as long as the performance was there and knowing it's built rugged with no moving parts.

To speak on the treating the SSD like a queen convo bigbulus brought up. It is what it is; Some research has shown what tiller speaks of. The most I personally do to tweak my system for an SSD is to limit the amount of 'system' writes that's being done to it. For ex. disabling cache-writing (debatable), Windows Search (indexing), pagefile etc.

 

Here is a link for those concerned about the amount of writes you put on a SSD. A lot of info and quite a few ssd's here, but some very interesting info. SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm - Page 89 Go through the thread, it is an eye opener.

 

FWIW, I just re-enabled write-caching on my M4 SSD.

It kills 4k writes! There's no debate about it anymore for me...as my previous post suggested.

 

I was wondering, I have the 256gb Samsung 470 SSD, do I need to be about 100gb full each time?

Most of the time, I use my laptop to photo editing (e.g. adobe cs5) and 3d modeling (e.g. lightwave, vue infinite). And I'll download episodes of about a few tv shows each week and watch them. I recently got this drive, like approximately 11 days ago to be precise.

I would like to make sure this drive lasts, as I know it is SATA 2 but my laptop doesn't supports SATA 3, so I didn't even bother trying to get the Crucial M4 drive.

 

What I would do is a 'Shrink' partition in Disk Management to about 160GB (around 70% of the total, formatted capacity) and use the drive indiscriminately (Windows will warn you when you are approaching the formatted capacity of the drive).

This will give the controller over 70GB extra nand chips to effectively and optimally do internal GC and TRIM commands.

You should get sick of using this system before the SSD (nand) gives up on you.

Hope this helps.

 

K gotcha, I just cloned my HDD on to this drive when I got it until I read up why you shouldn't really do that. And I'm most probably going to get started on the re-installation of Windows 7 on this drive and do a clean install and format it as you stated here.

In order to keep everything organized, I ended up adding a DIY 6TB Dual-Bay NAS to my apartment, that way I can keep everything flowing all the time. I feel as if this is works for me, but as you can see, that's why I'm asking about the mSATA.

Thanks for all your help!

 

seriously, till.. hahaha. one of the reasons i left this forum for quite a while.. you're still on this trip?

 

LOL some people never change

Welcome back by the way

 

Don't blame me for not having anything to contribute.

I'm not the only one on this 'trip' - many others notice it too - I'm just more vocal about it.

 

people can be vocal about anything, doesn't change that facts are facts, and lies are lies.