Simple SSD question

[Ryarwood99]

So I know I'm supposed to leave about 20-25% of my SSD free for better performance and I understand why. My question is can I just make that a separate partition of unallocated space or does that defeat the purpose? I don't think it would work but I just want to make sure because that would be an easy way to always make sure.

 

[RealBeast]

The consensus that I see around here is 10-15% on modern drives to allow adequate space for wear leveling. 20-25% seems a bit more than necessary. I would not make a partition, allow the SSD controller to do its job dealing with wear leveling.

If you do ever fill it fully you can always secure erase it to get it back to normal performance. I've done this many times with an old 80GB Intel drive and it always gets back to normal.

 

[Ryarwood99]

It's an old SSD (literally twice the price when I bought it than the newer version of it is). What is secure erase? Everytime I get a little too close to capacity I just copy anything I need to HDD and then delete it if it can't be uninstalled.

 

[USAFRet]

So I know I'm supposed to leave about 20-25% of my SSD free for better performance and I understand why. My question is can I just make that a separate partition of unallocated space or does that defeat the purpose? I don't think it would work but I just want to make sure because that would be an easy way to always make sure.

Partitions on an SSD don't work the same as on an HDD.

On the HDD, a partition is an actual physical space. The literal inner 1/3 of the platter, or whatever.

With an SSD, it is simply a logical representation of space that it shows you. The actual cells are managed completely via the drive firmware, which is much smarter than you or I. You can't partition off 'those cells', never to be used. Nor would you want to.

If you have a Samsung drive, the Magician will let you save out some space for this purpose. This simply doesn't let you fill up the whole drive.

Over Provisioning, in Samsung Magician.
Here, 10%:

In essence, whatever I do, I cannot use 10% of the space. Thereby allowing the firmware to shuffle write cycles among cells, as it sees fit, for wear leveling.

 

[Ryarwood99]

Is there a similar program for Kingston drives?

 

[RealBeast]

It's an old SSD (literally twice the price when I bought it than the newer version of it is). What is secure erase? Everytime I get a little too close to capacity I just copy anything I need to HDD and then delete it if it can't be uninstalled.

Secure erase writes to every cell on the SSD NAND and puts it back to its just from the factory status. Many storage people and SSD sellers recommend doing so when you get near capacity as it is completely effective in resetting the drive. It is also useful to do if you sell or give away a drive to really wipe the information, although it may be insufficient for classified data or the like.

Is there a similar program for Kingston drives?

Yes, for Sandforce based Kingston drive, HERE.

 

[Ryarwood99]

I thought you weren't supposed to delete like that because an SSD has a limited number of reads

 

[USAFRet]

I thought you weren't supposed to delete like that because an SSD has a limited number of reads

"limited number of writes". Not reads.
But that 'limit' is huge. In normal consumer use, you will almost certainly never wear it out from too many writes.

And the Secure Erase is fine. Just don't do it twice a day, every day...

 

[Ryarwood99]

Thanks! Yeah I meant writes