• Computers
  • SSD's Too Full? - How much is Too much.
2014/11/29 18:30:46
rtucker55
I have 3 Samsung sample drives in the desk PC and they all have/had about 10% free space left. I put just a little more on one and now notice windows shows a Red bar when looking at the drive capacities.
 
Will it hurt anything if the drive is a little under the 10% free space win 7 seems to expect? I never defrag SSD's and am guessing that is why Win 7 wants the 10% free space.
 
I don't notice any functional issues but am curious if this will reduce SSD life span.
 
Kind regards,
Rick
2014/11/29 20:45:42
YouDontHasToCallMeJohnson
If the disk is only used for samples access free space does not matter.
 
Make sure a page file is not on the disk.
 
Stop system restore from monitoring the disk.
 
Run disk clean up to remove old deleted stuff: files and restore data.
2014/12/01 12:01:54
Wookiee
Never defrag SSD's it will cause you nothing but grief.
2014/12/01 14:15:01
johnkeel
Actually it is recommended to leave a big chunk free. The SSD firmware will use that space to maintenance.
If you have a Samsung you will notice that the software even allows to do overposition, which basically is creating a unpartitioned space with the recommended size (around 10%-20% if i recall), that way you dont need to worry about filling it up.

From the Web:

Don’t Fill Them to Capacity

You should leave some free space on your solid-state drive or its write performance will slow down dramatically. This may be surprising, but it’s actually fairly simple to understand.
When an SSD has a lot of free space, it has a lot of empty blocks. When you go to write a file, it writes that file’s data into the empty blocks.
When an SSD has little free space, it has a lot of partially filled blocks. When you go to write a file, it will have to read the partially filled block into its cache, modify the partially-filled block with the new data, and then write it back to the hard drive. This will need to happen with every block the file must be written to.
In other words, writing to an empty block is fairly quick, but writing to a partially-filled block involves reading the partially-filled block, modifying its value, and then writing it back. Repeat this many, many times for each file you write to the drive as the file will likely consume many blocks.
As a result of its benchmarks, Anandtech recommends that you “plan on using only about 75% of its capacity if you want a good balance between performance consistency and capacity.” In other words, set aside 25% of your drive and don’t write to it. Only use up to 75% of your drive’s free space and you should maintain ideal performance. You’ll see write performance start to slow down as you go above that mark.
2014/12/01 16:36:26
slartabartfast
Good point johnkeel, but it probably does not apply when the drive is used read-only to serve up samples. You can take as long as you want to write the samples to the drive in that case, and nothing is being modified once they are written.
2014/12/01 17:24:38
rtucker55
The drives are Samsung and have been overly provisioned to provide plenty of room for 'Garbage Collection' activities. They rarely see any writes compared to the reads. I have been using SSD's for awhile so I am familiar with most of the 'Do's and Dont's' when using them.
 
My main concern is why Windows puts the Red Bar on a drive whose usable capacity exceeds 10% free space and if it could do something stupid to reduce the life span of the drive.
 
My solution was to order a larger drive, I will move some samples so I can gain some free space over all 3 drives. Probably a better solution would be to stop buying sample libraries...
 
Thanks for every ones help.
 
Kind regards,
Rick
2014/12/01 19:57:04
Sycraft
The red bar is a thing from magnetic drives. If you get them under about 10% space, performance tanks. So Windows warns you. However it does it on everything, even network shares. So if I set you up a share on a file server and give you a 1GB quota, it'll go red at 900MB. Never mind that the file server might have terabytes free, it warns on the share as you see it.
2014/12/01 20:31:51
rtucker55
Thanks for the info Sycraft!
2014/12/27 19:04:16
jbow
I just saw a 1TB SSD on Newegg for under 400 bucks. It looks like the price is really dropping. Maybe in a year they will be comparatively cheap! There were a handful of 1TB drives in the 400+ range. I almost didn't look at 1TB SSDs because the price on 750G SSDs was too high, I was surprised!!
 
I'd post a link but the forum police software has been hard on posted links lately, however, you can type Newegg in the Google search box. TigerDirect probably has deals as good and I've found that both companies seem like they knew what I was going to order and shipped it a couple of days before, once I had a slow order but I have had things show up in two days.
 
Anyway, 1TB SSD for samples and possibly for projects, heck for everything in a year I'm thinking. The future is bright sometimes, in small flashes. I'd like to be flashing! LOL...
 
J
2014/12/27 19:42:44
rtucker55
Thanks for the reply jbow!
 
I ended up getting a Samsung 1TB on sale at B&H Photo for about $20 less than Neweggs sale price. B&H Photo also expedited shipping so I had it 2 days later.
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