Jump to content
NotebookTalk

free space and ssd health


Light

Recommended Posts

I think there are two possible reasons for leaving some unpartitioned free space: One is to have a supply of usable space for reallocation should the drive software find some bad blocks (I think some SSDs keep some reserve space which is never available to the user). The other reason for some free space is to facilitate garbage management. My rule of thumb is 5% subject to a minimum of 50GB (my recent SSDs are 1TB or larger). However, I think the minimum sensible free space will also depend on usage patterns. If there's a lot of changing and writing of files then there's more garbage.

 

However, I've not had SSD problems for about 10 years as SSD capacities have increased. I did have problems with early low capacity mSATA SSDs which I had filled so they lacked free space and there were times when the computer slowed to a crawl as the system had to do a lot of tidying up in order to write a file.

  • Thumb Up 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Even if you do absolutely nothing to the drive, you will almost certainly upgrade/replace it long before NAND flash wear becomes remotely close to an issue.

  • Thumb Up 2

Desktop: Ryzen 5 5600X3D | 32 GB RAM | GeForce RTX 4070 Super | 4 TB SSD | Windows 11

Gigabyte Aorus 16X: Core i7-14650HX | 32 GB RAM | GeForce RTX 4070 | 2 TB SSD | Windows 11

Lenovo IdeaPad 3 Gaming: Ryzen 7 6800H | 16 GB RAM | GeForce RTX 3050 | 512 GB SSD | Windows 11

Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro: Ryzen 5 5600U | 16 GB RAM | Radeon Graphics | 512 GB SSD | Windows 11

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, saturnotaku said:

Even if you do absolutely nothing to the drive, you will almost certainly upgrade/replace it long before NAND flash wear becomes remotely close to an issue.

Good point. My comment had focussed on performance. Here's some SMART data for a 2TB Sabrent Rocket I bought several years ago. The manufacturers' claimed life is measured in hundreds of Terrabytes written (TBW). That SSD has accumulated 18TBW in over 6000 hours of operation.

 

Sabrent Rocket SSD details.jpg

  • Thumb Up 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Think about how high the warranty TBW value is and how long you might want to use the drive.

 

Let's look at, for example, Samsung 980 Pro.  The 1TB version is 600 TBW for warranty purposes.  Samsung is confident that you can write 600 TB to the drive to the point that they will replace it for you if it fails before then.

 

Let's say you think you might keep it for five years (which happens to be the warranty period).  600 TBW ÷1825 days = 336 GB per day you would have to write to the drive to hit the TBW limit before the five-year warranty is up, or about one third of the drive's total capacity.

 

There might be days here and there when you write that much but mostly I'd imagine you'd be in the single-digit GB's per day for daily use, if even that, unless you're doing something very data intensive.

 

(Third-party tests have shown that these drives generally work well beyond the warranty TBW limit, as well.  It's not like you have to throw it out if it does hit 600 TBW.)

 

Bottom line — Don't worry too much about your SSD drive health with regards to writes unless you're doing something extreme.  It does have a limited number of writes, but that number is still so high that you're unlikely to reach it during the drive's practical lifetime.

 

Not to say that SSDs can't fail...  It's just not often from "hitting the write limit" (in my experience).  Have a backup strategy for any important data.

 

Rule of thumb for me is at least 10% free space (unless maybe it is a very large drive, then perhaps less than 10%).  That's more because I don't want to be worried about running out of space by surprise/accident than because of performance considerations, but having the drive not being completely full can help the SSD do its thing (garbage collection / wear leveling / etc.) more effectively.

  • Thumb Up 6

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal) • Dell Precision 7560 (work) • Full specs in spoiler block below
Info posts (Windows) — Turbo boost toggle • The problem with Windows 11 • About Windows 10/11 LTSC

Spoiler

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal)

  • M2 Max
    • 4 efficiency cores
    • 8 performance cores
    • 38-core Apple GPU
  • 96GB LPDDR5-6400
  • 8TB SSD
  • macOS 15 "Sequoia"
  • 16.2" 3456×2234 120 Hz mini-LED ProMotion display
  • Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3
  • 99.6Wh battery
  • 1080p webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

Also — iPhone 12 Pro 512GB, Apple Watch Series 8

 

Dell Precision 7560 (work)

  • Intel Xeon W-11955M ("Tiger Lake")
    • 8×2.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading ("Willow Cove")
  • 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC
  • NVIDIA RTX A2000 4GB
  • Storage:
    • 512GB system drive (Micron 2300)
    • 4TB additional storage (Sabrent Rocket Q4)
  • Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
  • 15.6" 3940×2160 IPS display
  • Intel Wi-Fi AX210 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3)
  • 95Wh battery
  • 720p IR webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

 

Previous

  • Dell Precision 7770, 7530, 7510, M4800, M6700
  • Dell Latitude E6520
  • Dell Inspiron 1720, 5150
  • Dell Latitude CPi
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think that's dated advice from when SSDs were smaller and TBWs were less.  Hibernate away.

  • Thumb Up 1

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal) • Dell Precision 7560 (work) • Full specs in spoiler block below
Info posts (Windows) — Turbo boost toggle • The problem with Windows 11 • About Windows 10/11 LTSC

Spoiler

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal)

  • M2 Max
    • 4 efficiency cores
    • 8 performance cores
    • 38-core Apple GPU
  • 96GB LPDDR5-6400
  • 8TB SSD
  • macOS 15 "Sequoia"
  • 16.2" 3456×2234 120 Hz mini-LED ProMotion display
  • Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3
  • 99.6Wh battery
  • 1080p webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

Also — iPhone 12 Pro 512GB, Apple Watch Series 8

 

Dell Precision 7560 (work)

  • Intel Xeon W-11955M ("Tiger Lake")
    • 8×2.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading ("Willow Cove")
  • 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC
  • NVIDIA RTX A2000 4GB
  • Storage:
    • 512GB system drive (Micron 2300)
    • 4TB additional storage (Sabrent Rocket Q4)
  • Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
  • 15.6" 3940×2160 IPS display
  • Intel Wi-Fi AX210 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3)
  • 95Wh battery
  • 720p IR webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

 

Previous

  • Dell Precision 7770, 7530, 7510, M4800, M6700
  • Dell Latitude E6520
  • Dell Inspiron 1720, 5150
  • Dell Latitude CPi
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
On 10/14/2022 at 4:05 PM, Aaron44126 said:

Think about how high the warranty TBW value is and how long you might want to use the drive.

 

Let's look at, for example, Samsung 980 Pro.  The 1TB version is 600 TBW for warranty purposes.  Samsung is confident that you can write 600 TB to the drive to the point that they will replace it for you if it fails before then.

 

Let's say you think you might keep it for five years (which happens to be the warranty period).  600 TBW ÷1825 days = 336 GB per day you would have to write to the drive to hit the TBW limit before the five-year warranty is up, or about one third of the drive's total capacity.

 

There might be days here and there when you write that much but mostly I'd imagine you'd be in the single-digit GB's per day for daily use, if even that, unless you're doing something very data intensive.

 

(Third-party tests have shown that these drives generally work well beyond the warranty TBW limit, as well.  It's not like you have to throw it out if it does hit 600 TBW.)

 

Bottom line — Don't worry too much about your SSD drive health with regards to writes unless you're doing something extreme.  It does have a limited number of writes, but that number is still so high that you're unlikely to reach it during the drive's practical lifetime.

 

Not to say that SSDs can't fail...  It's just not often from "hitting the write limit" (in my experience).  Have a backup strategy for any important data.

 

Rule of thumb for me is at least 10% free space (unless maybe it is a very large drive, then perhaps less than 10%).  That's more because I don't want to be worried about running out of space by surprise/accident than because of performance considerations, but having the drive not being completely full can help the SSD do its thing (garbage collection / wear leveling / etc.) more effectively.

 

That's how I got caught out by Samsung's meager TBW. 30GB/day is not necessarily that much. Actually it works out to around... 340KB/s. Then I woke up with 100 TB written in a month lol. For light I/O use, gaming etc. people can rest assured their Samsung SSDs will hold up, otherwise it helps to actually spend a moment to estimate TBW based on projected usage. 

 

Frequent hibernation of a 32GB machine doesn't seem to be a problem, I've done it for years. Would be interesting to know why, a very fast compression algorithm is probably involved. 

"We're rushing towards a cliff, but the closer we get, the more scenic the views are."

-- Max Tegmark

 

AI: Major Emerging Existential Threat To Humanity

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The figure I gave, 336 GB per day, works out to about 4 MB/s. Maybe you’d hit this consistently if you were running a DVR or camera monitoring system or something? For most workloads, I think reads would be way more common than writes and there’s no reason someone would be writing MB/s amounts of data, consistently forever.

 

If you do find yourself worried about it, you can raise the TBW by getting more/bigger SSDs.

 

Microsoft does compress data going to the hibernate file, and they also throw out anything not required (I.e. cached files from disk stored in RAM).

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal) • Dell Precision 7560 (work) • Full specs in spoiler block below
Info posts (Windows) — Turbo boost toggle • The problem with Windows 11 • About Windows 10/11 LTSC

Spoiler

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal)

  • M2 Max
    • 4 efficiency cores
    • 8 performance cores
    • 38-core Apple GPU
  • 96GB LPDDR5-6400
  • 8TB SSD
  • macOS 15 "Sequoia"
  • 16.2" 3456×2234 120 Hz mini-LED ProMotion display
  • Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3
  • 99.6Wh battery
  • 1080p webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

Also — iPhone 12 Pro 512GB, Apple Watch Series 8

 

Dell Precision 7560 (work)

  • Intel Xeon W-11955M ("Tiger Lake")
    • 8×2.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading ("Willow Cove")
  • 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC
  • NVIDIA RTX A2000 4GB
  • Storage:
    • 512GB system drive (Micron 2300)
    • 4TB additional storage (Sabrent Rocket Q4)
  • Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
  • 15.6" 3940×2160 IPS display
  • Intel Wi-Fi AX210 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3)
  • 95Wh battery
  • 720p IR webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

 

Previous

  • Dell Precision 7770, 7530, 7510, M4800, M6700
  • Dell Latitude E6520
  • Dell Inspiron 1720, 5150
  • Dell Latitude CPi
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Etern4l said:

 

That's how I got caught out by Samsung's meager TBW. 30GB/day is not necessarily that much. Actually it works out to around... 340KB/s. Then I woke up with 100 TB written in a month lol. For light I/O use, gaming etc. people can rest assured their Samsung SSDs will hold up, otherwise it helps to actually spend a moment to estimate TBW based on projected usage. 

 

Frequent hibernation of a 32GB machine doesn't seem to be a problem, I've done it for years. Would be interesting to know why, a very fast compression algorithm is probably involved. 

this is only an issue if ure worried about official warranty. if u just go by actual reliability, rest assured ur samsung ssd will have closer to like an order of magnitude higher TBW before it gives out on you

Mine: Hyperion "Titan God of Heat, Heavenly Light, Power" (2022-24)
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (TG High Perf. IHS) / Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme / MSI Geforce RTX 4090 Suprim X / Teamgroup T-Force Delta RGB DDR5-8200 2x24 GB / Seagate Firecuda 530 4 TB / 5x Samsung 860 Evo 4 TB / Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 (Push/Pull 6x Noctua NF-A14 IndustrialPPC-3000 intake) / Seasonic TX-1600 W Titanium / Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 TG (3x Arctic P12 A-RGB intake / 4x Arctic P14 A-RGB exhaust / 1x Arctic P14 A-RGB RAM cooling) / Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32" 4K 240 Hz / Ducky One 3 Daybreak Fullsize Cherry MX Brown / Corsair M65 Ultra RGB / PDP Afterglow Wave Black / Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro X Limited Edition

 

My Lady's: Clevo NH55JNNQ "Alfred" (2022-24)
Sharp LQ156M1JW03 FHD matte 15.6" IGZO 8 bit @248 Hz / Intel Core i5 12600 / Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070 Ti / Mushkin Redline DDR4-3200 2x32 GB / Samsung 970 Pro 1 TB / Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB / Intel AX201 WIFI 6+BT 5.2 / Win 11 Pro Phoenix Lite OS / 230 W PSU powered by Prema Mod!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

The figure I gave, 336 GB per day, works out to about 4 MB/s. Maybe you’d hit this consistently if you were running a DVR or camera monitoring system or something? For most workloads, I think reads would be way more common than writes and there’s no reason someone would be writing MB/s amounts of data, consistently forever.

 

If you do find yourself worried about it, you can raise the TBW by getting more/bigger SSDs.

 

Microsoft does compress data going to the hibernate file, and they also throw out anything not required (I.e. cached files from disk stored in RAM).

 

Haha, sorry, teaches me for responding on the phone without glasses. 4MB/s is more respectable but still peanuts in many cases, and gosh forbid you start swapping - you'll go through that Samsung TBW allowance like a hot knife through butter. I guess what I'm saying is that it would be nice if Samsung could up this, as least on the Pro models. Alas, still 600TBW per 1TB on the 990 Pro.

"We're rushing towards a cliff, but the closer we get, the more scenic the views are."

-- Max Tegmark

 

AI: Major Emerging Existential Threat To Humanity

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

 

Haha, sorry, teaches me for responding on the phone without glasses. 4MB/s is more respectable but still peanuts in many cases, and gosh forbid you start swapping - you'll go through that Samsung TBW allowance like a hot knife through butter. I guess what I'm saying is that it would be nice if Samsung could up this, as least on the Pro models. Alas, still 600TBW per 1TB on the 990 Pro.

is the 990 pro out yet anywhere? last ive seen was like a january release (planned). 

Mine: Hyperion "Titan God of Heat, Heavenly Light, Power" (2022-24)
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (TG High Perf. IHS) / Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme / MSI Geforce RTX 4090 Suprim X / Teamgroup T-Force Delta RGB DDR5-8200 2x24 GB / Seagate Firecuda 530 4 TB / 5x Samsung 860 Evo 4 TB / Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 (Push/Pull 6x Noctua NF-A14 IndustrialPPC-3000 intake) / Seasonic TX-1600 W Titanium / Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 TG (3x Arctic P12 A-RGB intake / 4x Arctic P14 A-RGB exhaust / 1x Arctic P14 A-RGB RAM cooling) / Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32" 4K 240 Hz / Ducky One 3 Daybreak Fullsize Cherry MX Brown / Corsair M65 Ultra RGB / PDP Afterglow Wave Black / Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro X Limited Edition

 

My Lady's: Clevo NH55JNNQ "Alfred" (2022-24)
Sharp LQ156M1JW03 FHD matte 15.6" IGZO 8 bit @248 Hz / Intel Core i5 12600 / Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070 Ti / Mushkin Redline DDR4-3200 2x32 GB / Samsung 970 Pro 1 TB / Samsung 870 QVO 8 TB / Intel AX201 WIFI 6+BT 5.2 / Win 11 Pro Phoenix Lite OS / 230 W PSU powered by Prema Mod!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal) • Dell Precision 7560 (work) • Full specs in spoiler block below
Info posts (Windows) — Turbo boost toggle • The problem with Windows 11 • About Windows 10/11 LTSC

Spoiler

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal)

  • M2 Max
    • 4 efficiency cores
    • 8 performance cores
    • 38-core Apple GPU
  • 96GB LPDDR5-6400
  • 8TB SSD
  • macOS 15 "Sequoia"
  • 16.2" 3456×2234 120 Hz mini-LED ProMotion display
  • Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3
  • 99.6Wh battery
  • 1080p webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

Also — iPhone 12 Pro 512GB, Apple Watch Series 8

 

Dell Precision 7560 (work)

  • Intel Xeon W-11955M ("Tiger Lake")
    • 8×2.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading ("Willow Cove")
  • 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC
  • NVIDIA RTX A2000 4GB
  • Storage:
    • 512GB system drive (Micron 2300)
    • 4TB additional storage (Sabrent Rocket Q4)
  • Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
  • 15.6" 3940×2160 IPS display
  • Intel Wi-Fi AX210 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3)
  • 95Wh battery
  • 720p IR webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

 

Previous

  • Dell Precision 7770, 7530, 7510, M4800, M6700
  • Dell Latitude E6520
  • Dell Inspiron 1720, 5150
  • Dell Latitude CPi
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. Terms of Use