How much space should be partitioned on an SSD?

[hyp3r1onsun]

Model: 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD (Samsung)

The SSD runs my OS on a manufactured HP laptop. I've read a lot of conflicting information that says to leave anywhere from 50% to 0% of an SSD free to avoid performance loss. Is there a definitive percentage?

[Illusion of Progress]

Performance impacts from lack of free space varies do exist, and depend on what you're doing at the time, as well as the specific drive in question even. They tend to exist a bit more more in metrics rather than practical differences in my experience, and are more gradual as the drive fills (more so with HDDs than SDDs) rather than there being an extreme drop off after a point, at least until the drive is really full and also needs to do a task where it's constrained on space, in which case there might be issues.

For a storage drive, there's little that it really matters. Is it going to matter if you nearly fill a 4 TB storage (~3.63 TB usable) drive to 3.5 TB used? For the most part, not really.

HDDs will turn in better scores when empty, and towards either the outside or inside (I forget which but it's one of them) of the platter. Things gradual drop as they fill. This less applies to SSDs, as said before, but they can still encounter some differences if there's really little space, and provisioning and some other things work better when they're more free space to juggle things around.

For an OS or scratch drive it's a bit different though maybe. I'd leave a buffer on them, but I wouldn't say there's an exact percent or even GB value that you should fixate on. I've had less than 10 GB free on a 256 GB SATA SSD a few times and didn't see disastrous results for practical use/gaming, though I only ran that way short term and I definitely don't recommend having such little space in practice, and I usually didn't (I tended to want to stay at around 50 GB or a bit less free at worst, though that was probably quite a bit more than necessary, but before I started using it more for games, the OS and programs barely used space so I was used to having a lot free). On a 512 GB drive I'd probably apply a similar buffer, which would be somewhere between 20% and 25% of the drive space. This isn't even to say you need to leave that much, and intentionally leaving 50% is rather unnecessary; it's a big waste of space. But if you're consistently below 20% and having to juggle stuff to make room, it's at least close to time to consider adding more space.

I'm not sure if Windows still does it but it used to be at a certain point the drive bar would turn Red, indicating it was near full and could warrant attention.

[nullable]

Първоначално публикувано от hyp3r1onsun:

Model: 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD

The SSD runs my OS on a manufactured HP laptop. I've read a lot of conflicting information that says to leave anywhere from 50% to 0% of an SSD free to avoid performance loss. Is there a definitive percentage?

No. And I wouldn't worry about it. Even nearly full the drive will perform well enough for a good user experience. And if you do put too much on it and aren't happy with the performance, you can move data off any time you wish. It's not a big deal and a bit of unneeded fuss trying to maintain optimal disk performance.

[Azza ☠]

What brand of SSD are you using?

It's called Over-Provisioning and some SSD models will do it for you. Such as with Samsung, just install the Samsung Magician and look under the Over-Provisioning tab.

You normally set around 10%, but it will depend on the overall drive size.

Some other SSD models have it built-in already, which is why you get odd amounts of drive space to start off with. For example a 500GB drive likely has 512GB worth of NAND. If you find you free space is less than 512GB, you might find it's already done it. As 512GB is an odd amount otherwise, designed for it.

ps: Windows will generally use TRIM. This means as long as you have X% free space on the filesystem, the drive will see X% as unallocated. Over-provisioning not required for some modern SSDs so long you have free disk space available (all the over-provisioning would do in that case is ensure it and keep it to a certain area).

[Overseer]

512 GB is too small for partitions. And if you install Windows on it it will automatically create 3 partitions. 2 of which you will never interact with. The 3rd one will be your standard C: drive.
You partition the whole thing, without any empty space.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Първоначално публикувано от Overseer:

512 GB is too small for partitions. And if you install Windows on it it will automatically create 3 partitions. 2 of which you will never interact with. The 3rd one will be your standard C: drive.
You partition the whole thing, without any empty space.

And never a need to ever do this also.
Boot from Win10/11 USB Flash Drive you make w/ official MS OS ISO + the latest beta Rufus tool. Connect only the drive you wish to install OS onto + the OS installer media usb flash drive you created. Then boot from USB. Once you boot into the installer from USB Flash Drive, once you reach the Language options select that and click Next. Then press SHIFT+F10 to bring up a CMD window. Go to the root of the USB Flash Drive and then run DISKPART. Make a single partition for your SSD (GPT+NTFS).

Once this is done, exit the CMD window, and follow the steps of the OS installer. Clicking Custom > select the drive and click Next. Now you will be doing a clean OS install and your SSD is properly partitions with only a single partition as this is really all that WinOS needs. You do this method to avoid the non-sense of how WinOS would normally automatically make 3x partitions.

[hyp3r1onsun]

Thanks for the help everyone.