how much free space am I supposed to leave on SSD?

[MustangSVT]

What is the official or tested freespace I need to leave on SSD?

Using 64gb M4 with Win7 with trim enabled.

 

[SickBeast]

I think it's around 20%.

The more important thing to do is to prevent writes to the thing. There was a whole ritual I went through when I got mine. You can move the swap file off of it or delete it entirely if you have enough memory and you know what you're doing.

I basically have mine setup as a read-only drive.

 

[MustangSVT]

I think it's around 20%.

The more important thing to do is to prevent writes to the thing. There was a whole ritual I went through when I got mine. You can move the swap file off of it or delete it entirely if you have enough memory and you know what you're doing.

I basically have mine setup as a read-only drive.

Yes, I've already disabled swap file. ALthough its not recommanded, nothing uses more than 6gb with what I use. (no illustrator these days).

you say 20%, but what is that based on? trying to get some "tested" figures.

 

[Hulk]

I have an Intel 320 120GB for OS only that has 40GB free. I also have a Kingston V100 128GB for data. I left the swap file and basically just let Windows 7 handle it. My thought is that if it only lasts a few years I'll buy a new, faster, cheaper, larger one.

 

[BrightCandle]

You do not need to leave any space on your SSD, all the space available is well available. The drive already has about flash earmarked for reducing write amplification and thus you can use the rest of the drive. If you leave space it may increase performance and reduce write amplification a little but its not something you have to do.

As for the Swap file you really don't need to remove it from the SSD. A lot of people worry about the durability of SSD drives unnecessarily. In practice they last longer than HDD's even when under heavy load. By putting your swap file on it all you are really doing is dramatically improving performance when you hit (the now rare) circumstance when you run out of RAM. The swap doesn't really need to be persistent so I see why people don't want to waste their SSD writing it but it really shouldn't generate a lot of writes unless you don't have enough RAM.

 

[Old Hippie]

20% is about right.

 

[Phynaz]

No reason to leave any free space.

 

[Coup27]

+1 for leaving space is not required. And on a 64GB drive, surely you'll want all the space you can get?

 

[groberts101]

I'm in the 20% crowd since filling up ANY SSD is not the smartest thing to do. Granted the newer firmware is better than it's ever been.. but why would anyone ever want to push their drive into read/write/modify states on-the-fly?

Seems just as silly as completely filling up an HDD even if the SSD remains faster than any HDD despite being full(or even full dirty).

And to accurately answer that question. Always leave the amount of space free.. that you intend for your data sets PER logged on session(or maybe better to say.. "need for that particular data set".

IOW.. if you use 12 gigs of space per session at times?.. always try to leave at least 12 gigs free/empty plus some breathing room. Then adding some dedicated logged off idle time for gabage collection to clean up that space(remember that GC still has its place too regardless of trim availability) will always assure that you have at least that much space clean and available for the next write session. That will definately avoid any slowdowns or degradation no matter how hard you push any smaller or midsized drive as you can be assured it's "charged back up and ready to go" when needed.

 

[Coup27]

As the drive already has a portion hidden from the user for spare area for this purpose, I would not want to sacrifice another 12GB from an already small drive.

 

[ElFenix]

now if only there was a way to move hiberfil.sys

 

[Coup27]

now if only there was a way to move hiberfil.sys

Why don't you turn off hibernation?

 

[ElFenix]

Why don't you turn off hibernation?

i kinda like it

 

[Coup27]

Hibernating to an SSD murders it with writes though. Not good for longevity

 

[groberts101]

As the drive already has a portion hidden from the user for spare area for this purpose, I would not want to sacrifice another 12GB from an already small drive.

I certainly hear that point.. but my point was that the OP'd space won't save you from read/write/modify or the need to clean space on-the-fly in expectation of the next write load to the drive if your data sets exceed that available space. Firmware still has limitations and smaller drives are affected even moreso than larger one's since they start out slower overall in the first place to ultimately mean they will be impacted even moreso.

IOW.. running a smaller/midsized drive low on resources will penalize you to the point that you may notice moreso, is all.

Then again.. if you don't constantly stream larger amounts of media(vids, music, etc)?.. edit gfx, vids, music?.. then you can surely get by with smaller margins of free space. Is exactly why I said it needs to be based on the expected write load of the drives usage scenario. There is no set amount of free space that will work for all.. and we can only generalize. 🙂

 

[jhansman]

One note for Photoshop users (from Adobe's site):

Solid-state disks

Installing Photoshop on a solid-state disk (SSD) allows Photoshop to launch fast, probably in less than a second. But that speedier startup is the only time savings you experience, because that’s the only time when much data is read from the SSD.

To gain the greatest benefit from an SSD, use it as the scratch disk. Using it as a scratch disk gives you significant performance improvements if you have images that don’t fit entirely in RAM. For example, swapping tiles between RAM and an SSD is much faster than swapping between RAM and a hard disk.

If your SSD doesn’t have much free space (if the scratch file grows bigger than can fit on the SSD), you can add a secondary or tertiary hard disk (after the SSD).

Also, SSDs vary widely in performance, much more so than hard disks. Using an earlier, slower drive results in little improvement over a hard disk.

Note: Adding RAM to improve performance is more cost effective than purchasing an SSD. If money is no object, you're maxed out on installed RAM for your computer, you run Photoshop CS5 as a 64-bit application, and you still want to improve performance, then consider using a solid-state disk as your scratch disk.

 

[Phynaz]

Hibernating to an SSD murders it with writes though. Not good for longevity

Nope.

I hibernate several times a day. I only have 2TB of writes since April.

 

[mmaestro]

Nope.

I hibernate several times a day. I only have 2TB of writes since April.

This. When I first got an SSD I went through the whole ritual of trying to reduce writes, but as far as I can tell, they're not actually being killed by writes. Folks have been trying. Newer SSDs are robust enough that you can just throw your system on there and forget about it.

 

[Old Hippie]

I'm in the 20% crowd since filling up ANY SSD is not the smartest thing to do.

Yep.

My estimate is from three years of SSD personal experience but everyone has different desktop usage.

If/when your drive starts to slow down, you went to far. 🙂

 

[groberts101]

That's exactly right. The specific users usage patterns and perception will be the final deciding factor regardless of opinions on the matter.

The SSD will only let you push it so far until it forces you to examine what you are doing wrong. lol

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Hibernating to an SSD murders it with writes though. Not good for longevity

This has been debunked so many times that it's annoying that it continues to come up. No normal computer users, even power users, are *ever* going to wear out an SSD.

Now, having said that, write amplification is worsened when an SSD has little free space to play with. Anand's articles have explored this in depth. The problem starts to manifest around the 80% mark, will impact performance around 90%, and will typically create problems if you fill the drive (and leave it filled).

If you run an SSD at greater than 80% capacity for a long time with lots of write activity, then you could possibly see longevity issues after a few years. Yes, years. Of continual writes.

Performance degradation is the real issue, not longevity.

... I basically have mine setup as a read-only drive.

You're denying yourself half the benefit of an SSD...

 

[Soulkeeper]

You payed good money for the thing
Get your money worth.
Fill it up, throw swap files on it, benchmark it constantly, etc.
Whatever gets you excited, no point in babying it imo

 

[Old Hippie]

This has been debunked so many times that it's annoying that it continues to come up. No normal computer users, even power users, are *ever* going to wear out an SSD.

Now, having said that, write amplification is worsened when an SSD has little free space to play with. Anand's articles have explored this in depth. The problem starts to manifest around the 80% mark, will impact performance around 90%, and will typically create problems if you fill the drive (and leave it filled).

Of course you are correct and that's why I started, and stayed, with 20% but like many here just get tired of answering the same question(s) over and over.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Of course you are correct and that's why I started, and stayed, with 20% but like many here just get tired of answering the same question(s) over and over.

Yeah, most of the time I just skip over them nowadays, but every once in a while I get the urge to wage The Holy Internet War, you know.

I also generally recommend 80%. Partition the whole thing, but stay below 80% full, keep your SSD happy.

 

[groberts101]

In the end.. the one's who don't typically task the SSD that hard(gamers/surfers).. are the one's who say to fill it up.

All the others heavier users/multitaskers who have ever experienced that extra .03 latency increase along with reduced bandwidth performance(especially the small randoms) associated with an overly full/dirty SSD.. surely know the real truth. 🙂