Windows 10: How full do you keep your SSD?

I just joined the elite club of ssd owners*Tongue There seems to be a lot confusion as to how much storage is to be used on these drives. I have Over provisioning turned on, and it set about 46gb aside out of 500gb. So now I have 190gb left. I'm running a Samsung 850 EVO 500gb.

How are you managing the storage space on your ssd?

:)

 

How do you do a full backup?

damn. ok, so any other method?

 

How do you do a full backup?

Unfortunately no. The registration has closed a while ago. :smileysad:

 

I've read anywhere from 75% to 90% is about as full as you want your SSD to get before it starts getting write performance hits.

Here is an example of one of the gazillion articles on the subject out there: https://www.howtogeek.com/165542/why...-fill-them-up/

You already have 10% "blocked off" with your overprovisioning turned on.

I wouldn't get too concerned about it until you approached (or know you will approach) having only 70GB or so remaining on the SSD Windows/system partition. Then you might want to look at whether it's starting to slow down and see if you can eliminate or move some data off of it.

 

*Ditto you only at about 50% or less when my storage SSD gets past 50% I usually move old unused data off to my back up drive, WD Passport 4TB. My guess is\f you could go to 75% and not have issues. SSD aren't like Spinners where a lot of spinning and searching goes on looking for DATA. Even at 50% I don't seen any difference in seek times there still very fast compared to a Spinner.

 

Don't worry about it unless you're running heavy disk write workloads all day, in which place you probably shouldn't be using a consumer drive. Only write speeds would be affected.

If you add up the capacity of the actual NAND chips in the drive you would get about 550GB (where GB means 10^10). So even if you don't do overprovisioning there's already ~10% reserved space on the drive.

 

GB: 10^9 bytes, GiB: 1024^3 bytes Gibibyte - Wikipedia

Although some manufacturers have OP built in, do you know this to be the case specifically for Samsung 850 EVOs? Any place you can point me to at Samsung to see that? If I can see it for myself, I'll go ahead and allocate the 46 GiB that I currently have unallocated.

 

Yes, GB == 10^9, that was a typo.

The 850 EVO 500GB uses 128Gib die (according to Anandtech) - so a 500GB SSD would mean 32x128Gib == 512GiB (550GB) in physical capacity. Seagate refers to this as "inherent over-provisioning" - https://www.seagate.com/tech-insight...its-master-ti/ - but all SSD manufacturers do this GB/GiB trickery to get "extra" space (otherwise you'd think the marketing department would start advertising them as 550GB drives) .

Samsung does not provide any documentation on what they use this extra space for so this is conjecture based on other manufacturers' behavior. But it would be strange if they wouldn't use this for over-provisioning.

 

Folks, you all are making things way to complicated.
Keep it simple.
Check your free space, when the free space gets between 10 and 20 % it's time to move some things off of the drive.
I personally check my drive often to see if I can remove junk that builds up.

It really isn't how much free space is need to effect the ssd. It's how much free space Windows 10 needs to do it's job properly.
Windows 10 needs elbow room to work properly. I really doesn't matter what hard drive or ssd you use.

Jack

 

OK, thanks, that's the kind of info I was looking for. In that case, I can reclaim the 10% OP I had set up (earlier in Samsung Magician, and then later through Disk Management alone).

That was kind of what I tried to find before and couldn't. Not necessarily surprising...

In any event, filling up an SSD still seems to be just as problematic from a disk performance standpoint as is running Windows out of room where it can't do the twice yearly upgrades or any other space demanding tasks.