[SOLVED] what's the minimum required space for a 128gb ssd to run perfectly?

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Apr 14, 2020
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I'm currently on 39gb free space on my c drive.
My previous experiences with HDDs is that they tend to slow down after losing 50% of it's total storage.
I wonder if it would happen to SSDs as
Well?
 
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For best performance you want no less than 25% free space on any SSD. The closer to full the greater the reduction in performance AND expected life. And, a 128GB SSD is FAR too small to be installing a system on these days.
I wonder if it would happen to SSDs as
HDDs loose performance because of file fragmentation. It is not because of insufficient free space.
For SSDs it's different. They do loose performance, if there's not enough free space for garbage collection processes to work efficiently.

I usually leave ~10-15% of SSD unallocated (not assigned to any partitions on the drive).
This is called overprovisioning.
 
If we dig in to the aspect of "running perfectly" - whatever that means, one may conclude that a database would be more effective than a file system (actually, I don't know this - just a suggestion). Maybe it make more sense to ask about maximum perceived performance?

So, If the very goal is to squeeze the most read/write performance out of it, then you need to start to put some prerequisites.
  • What kind of files is this, and the size distribution (most bigger or most smaller files) ?
  • File storage or OS partition ?
  • Most reads, most writes, or a mix ?
  • Any OS constraints (Window support NTFS and FAT, but other OS is said to support other file systems that may perform better) ?
  • Plan to put more that one into the system (you may want to do some load sharing - this depends on OS and usage) ?
Also, without digging any deeper in what you can do file-system-wise, if this is a Windows storage, I'd recommend doing:
  • Relocate the downloads, documents, etc to a separate disk. It often make sense using a spin disk for this purpose.
  • I made a llittle vbs script (a bat file may also probably do ok) that runs every time at startup and removes any leftover files in tmp folder (because over time it fills up of junk files).
  • Disable hibernation feature - because this tends to leave a very big file on the system partition occupying valuable space.
  • Disable indexing service (because this causes more writes to the file system) unless actual needed.
  • Disable writing of files last accessed time stamp will save some writes to file system, unless you somehow need it.
  • And probably several others, this is just the actions I'd come up with as right now and here.
 
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