Intel SSD question!

[varulv]

Hello! new here, so glad i found this place sadly i have more questions than answers.. kinda new to PCs but hopefully i'll learn and then share my knowledge someday.

I had PCs, never really used them apart from some gaming here and then(was more into consoles)however.. i recently decided to spend some extra cash and get a really good one.I guess the best part of my new rig is the SSD, really amazed on how fast everything happens!But i got some questions regarding SSDs:

At the moment it shows up as a 148gb one(altho its a 160) and i currently have 88GB of free space left, thing is.. is it ok to literally fill my SSD with games?Any chance that it gets 'slower' as you install stuff and it reaches its limit?Also, assuming that's okay.. should i leave some free GB anyway?
That is all actually, i also changed to ACHI the other day.. heard they perform better that way - but now i can eject my drives(also got a standard 500gb WD drive for backup etc)i find it kinda hilarious.. or should i be worried?

Thanks in advance people!

 

[christop]

Its never good to fill a drive slam full..

 

[jedimasterben]

To be more specific to you, filling an SSD is never a good idea. They have special algorithms to do wear leveling, rearranging everything on the drive to use all flash cells properly, not overusing some or underusing others. It's good to keep at least 20% of the drive free, as Intel add an additional 7% that is not visible to the end user to help with wear leveling.

As for the 148/160 issue, it's actually not. Windows counts in a different way than the drive manufacturers count (base 10 for the drive mans, and base 8 for Windows), so in the conversion, you "lose" space. It's perfectly normal.

AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface or something to that effect, and the "eject" option is part of what makes it "advanced". Quick drive removal is a part of the SATA specification, whereas that was not present in the older IDE spec. Also, AHCI enables a few other nifty little things, like NCQ, which sorts and handles several read/write operations much better than IDE does.

 

[varulv]

Thanks alot for your reply, very enlightening, indeed!


More stuff on it = faster wear eh?Got pretty paranoid now, thing was expensive as hell.. feels i should keep it at 30% but hey - i'll try to keep it around 70%.. hopefully that won't make it 'explode' sooner than expected.

 

[cjl]

If you absolutely cram a drive full, it will be slower (all drives, including SSDs), and SSDs specifically will have a shorter lifetime. I would tend to leave 40GB or so free for maximum performance, though you should be able to get a little more full than that before you really have issues.

Oh, and the 148GB is actually GiB (binary gigabytes, or gibibytes). A binary gigabyte is 2^30 bytes, which is slightly larger than the standard decimal (10^9) gigabyte. This is the reason for the discrepancy - your drive has 160 decimal gigabytes, but the OS is reporting in binary.