Samsung 850 Evo 256 GB minimum space

[Professur]

I have my Windoes 10, Browsers, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Rainbow Six:Siege and Battlefield 1 installed on my 256 GB SSD. While everything else were put into a new 2 TB HDD. I also have two old 1 TB 5400 RPM HDD's for back-ups.

So all 4 bays are occupied unless I duct tape my SSD on the side.

I thought everything is good until I realized Rainbow Six:Siege and Battlefield 1 keep rolling out new maps/patches/DLC and they actually ate up space.

Now my SSD is now down to 69 GB out of 232 GB (or 256 GB what Samsung says). I want a new 480 GB SSD for games but with the current price/exchange rate I want to wait 9 more months till the next Cyber Monday.

I have a H97 PC Mate and it doesn't seem to support M.2 of any kind?

https://ca.msi.com/Motherboard/H97-PC-Mate.html#hero-specification

 

[rhysiam]

What's the question? Are you worried about the minimum space on the 850 Evo? 70GB is absolutely fine.

20-25% is more than enough for even the highest workloads. The drive already has ~10% over provisioning built it, so as long as you keep ~30GB Free you should be absolutely fine. It'll still run just fine below that too, though really intensive I/O workloads might be start to be impacted (but gaming and general system use just never generate that kind of workload).

Even if you completely run out of space it's not going to harm the SSD in anyway. Assuming it's your boot drive, this can cause all kinds of issues, but they're software issues, not hardware.

Just keep an eye on your free space. An app like Treesize Free can be handy for looking for offending storage hogs: https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/

If you're really worried about maintaining the best performance possible, you used to be able to change the over-provisioning amount in Samsung magician, but they removed that feature. You can just leave some of your drive as unallocated disk space in Disk Management and that has the same effect. You can go into Disk Management and "shrink volume", and just leave it unallocated. But honestly, it's really not worth worrying about. The biggest concern is dropping your system drive to 0 free space which can stop it booting and cause all sorts of issue. Just keep an eye on it.

 

[derekullo]

You could redo it all and use the 2 terabyte as the system drive and use the 256 gigabyte ssd as a cache drive with Intel Smart Response.

You would only be able to use 64 gigabytes of the drive, but you wouldn't have to worry about filling it up since you would be writing to the 2 terabyte drives.

What you are currently doing sounds like a single 2 terabyte drive having a raid 1 with 2 - 1 terabyte drives in a raid 0.

Best case would be to buy another 2 terabyte drive and put them in a raid 1 with the 256 gigabyte SSD as the cache.

Tom has an old article about it, still accurate though.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-z68-express-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching,2938-3.html

Your motherboard does support it.

https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/H97-PC-Mate.html#hero-overview

 

[Professur]

Thanks guys.

I will just leave it at 30 GB which would be good for another ~20 DLC or so. By that time I would have moved on to new games and free up 100 GB.

Raid does sound like a plan but I would probably try that during my bi-annual clean-up.