Is SSD speed related to how full they are?

[Caveman]

These are the drives I currently have:

Crucial M500 960GBCrucial MX200 500GB

I've been very happy with them. At what capacity can I expect them to slow down, and how quickly will that degradation be once they do?

 

[Jembo]

I believe as long as you keep minimum 7% free you won't have speed issues. Just partition off 7-12% & don't worry about it.

 

[Charlie98]

For giggles, I loaded my old 60GB Agility3 (SATA3) drive up to and beyond 80%, just to see, it started to affect it at about 75%, and very much so at 80%+... but that was a smaller drive, of course. 10% is probably a good figure, although personally I leave 20%, moving files if I need to.

I've been very happy with them.

Be glad you have a 1TB M500... my 120GB M500 is a DOG. I initially thought something was wrong... but, in my case, that's how slow the 120GB M500 is! I've got it in my HTPC where it doesn't really matter.

 

[mv2devnull]

What are you actually measuring? A full filesystem (depends on filesystem and operations) can be slow too.

 

[Deders]

It used to be for certain drives. Some would have 2 modes and the slower mode would activate when the drive was 50% full. I don't think it affects modern drives.

 

[JimmiG]

For giggles, I loaded my old 60GB Agility3 (SATA3) drive up to and beyond 80%, just to see, it started to affect it at about 75%, and very much so at 80%+... but that was a smaller drive, of course. 10% is probably a good figure, although personally I leave 20%, moving files if I need to.

My 120GB Agility 3 is 95% full. However it's only used for games, so there are rarely any writes except when a game is updating. So it depends on how you use it too. An OS drive will get a lot more random writes.

It also depends on the drive, and newer drives/controllers are probably better at managing nearly full drives. They also have over-provisioning, SLC caches etc., areas that are not accessible in Windows. For example a 960GB drive might have 1024GB of raw capacity.

 

[Cerb]

Depends on how you use them. Even into over 90% used, they can maintain plenty of speed, for light use, and random access. FI, my 480GB one benchmarks fine, even when over 90% full. But, it slows down to ~50MBps sequential if I do something like copy some big ISOs to it, while it is nearly full. For normal use, it's fine even as it fills up, write amplification just gets a bit higher. But, for writing many GBs of sequential data to it, 100-150GB or so free seems to be the range where my 480GB starts really slowing down.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

You guys are in need of some Snakeoil Electricity to get them SSDz running right. Just like the Mobilz 1 oil in my truck, Snakeoil Electricity will do you right.

 

[tweakboy]

NO its flash,,,,,,,,,,, not a spinning hard drive.. gl