Does SSD slow down as it fills up?

[ratsa]

HDDs of course get much slower as they reach their storage limit.

Does anything similar have with SSDs? What percentage of the available space should I plan to fill up?

 

[Dereck47]

Does anything similar have with SSDs?

Yes

What percentage of the available space should I plan to fill up?

Keep 10-15% space available on your SSD.

 

[foscooter]

SSD slow down with multiple writes (5GB of data a day, for 5 years), not by how full they get.

A very full SSD may suffer from re-write problems, but TRIM should take care of cleaning the drive up after deletes.

But to resolve this issue, only use 80-85% of the total drive space. Leave the other 15-20% unallocated, unformatted. This is called over-provisioning.

Since SSDs in RAID 0 are TRIM unsupported, that's what I had to do to 'em, and NEVER had a problem.

 

[RetiredChief]

HDDs should also have about 10-> 15% free so that defrag can do it's work. However, HDDs performance will depend on where the data is located on the platters. If the data to be read (or written) is close to the center of the disk, performance takes a big hit as the angular velocity is MUCH lower than for data written to the out edges of the platters.

Note HDDs have an Average access speed, typically around 10->13 mSec. SSDs is 0.1 or less.

SSDs as others have states, and like HDDs, should have a Min of 10->15% left free - Just for different reason. While you do Not run defrag on an SSD, they do employ; Wear leveling, Garbage collection (Which trim improves this function) and for them to work their magic, they need this free space.

While a HDD that is say 70 used you will notice a performance hit - NO SO with a 70% filled SSD. SSDs do not have angular velocity, nor outer inner areas.

 

[ratsa]

I've noticed that my flash cards get slow when they're nearly full. I attributed to the controller having a harder time allocating free space. I don't know whether flash cards are comparable to SSDs.

Thank you for your help; I will plan on using only 85% of SSD capacity.

 

[ratsa]

Best answer selected by ratsa.

 

[dadogtv]

I experienced huge problems when I downloaded all my photos (74GB) to SSD (221GB) with windows installed on it. It took half an hour to start my computer after multiple attempts and I could not even start it in safe mode, and programs were responding extremely slow. SSD came to 200GB out of 221, so it was 10% free space. My laptop came back to normal after I erased all my photos again. Conclusion: Full SSD is definitely affecting computers performance. QED