First time using SSD. How much space should I leave on the drive?

[hyp3r1onsun]

Model: 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD
Edit: It's the default drive for my HP Omen Laptop. It came with 476 GB actually visible through the Storage tab in System Settings, with 50 GB or so of that 476 GB taken up by the OS and other pre-installed software. Not quite sure why it only shows a total of 476 GB of storage though?

[_I_]

keep about 10% free if possible

if the drive is near full get another to move stuff to or clone the os to a new larger drive

[Kobs]

I just installed one of those, transferred my entire Steam library/folder on it (Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 1TB PCI-E Gen 4.0 x4 NVMe) Man these things are scary fast

[nullable]

Originally posted by hyp3r1onsun:

Model: 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD
Edit: It's the default drive for my HP Omen Laptop. It came with 476 GB actually visible through the Storage tab in System Settings, with 50 GB or so of that 476 GB taken up by the OS and other pre-installed software. Not quite sure why it only shows a total of 476 GB of storage though?

The amount of space to leave available is just preference. You won't damage or cripple the drive using most of the space. And you're free to move files if you go over whatever arbitrary amount you're comfortable with.


The space disparity is a common question and it comes down to manufacturing using the actual SI prefix definitions for kilo, mega, giga, tera.

1 GB = 10^9 Byte = 1,000,000,000 Byte (what's used in drive marketing)

1 GiB = 2^30 Byte = 1,073,741,824 Byte (what's used by the PC)

So your drive is sold as having 512,000,000,000 bytes. If you take 512,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 476.837

If you wanted to have 512GB on your PC, 1,073,741,824 * 512 = 549.76GB or ~549,760,000,000 bytes is what the drive would be marketed as. This has been the status quo for decades. We didn't notice it as much when drives were measured in MB or even tens of GB. But the larger drives become the more inaccurate the base10 SI prefixes become in a base2 world. At 1KB 1024 vs 1000 isn't too far off. But you multiply that a few billion times, 24 bytes starts to add up into real space. A 1TB drive is closer to 900GB than it is to 1TB, for example (about 931GB)

[Bob the Boomer]

It depends on the file system AFAIK, i recall NTFS (what windows uses) requires %20 or more free space to perform at peak performance.

In practical use I personally do not go below %30 free space, I have seen my kids pc with %8 free space crawl to a snails pace and once i freed space to %20 or more it was back to normal

[Electric Cupcake]

Just don't let it automatically defrag/TRIM too often. Lowering the optimization schedule to once a month should be good, unless you use an unusual amount of caching and paging and stuff.

[_I_]

by default win 7+ will not defrag a ssd
trim is what ssd is supposed to use

[ESPAN1]

500m/s write wread speed

[A&A]

Originally posted by hyp3r1onsun:

Model: 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD
Edit: It's the default drive for my HP Omen Laptop. It came with 476 GB actually visible through the Storage tab in System Settings, with 50 GB or so of that 476 GB taken up by the OS and other pre-installed software. Not quite sure why it only shows a total of 476 GB of storage though?

Around 30%-20%

[Jonius7]

Originally posted by hyp3r1onsun:

Model: 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD
Edit: It's the default drive for my HP Omen Laptop. It came with 476 GB actually visible through the Storage tab in System Settings, with 50 GB or so of that 476 GB taken up by the OS and other pre-installed software. Not quite sure why it only shows a total of 476 GB of storage though?

It is the case for most manufacturers, to list HDDs and SSDs capacity as GB, where 1GB = 1000MB.

A computer calculates GB as power of 2, that is 1GB = 1024MB. Also known as GiB, or Gibibyte.

So 512GB = 476.837GiB

EDUT: I realised Brockenstein above already explained this