Should you still leave space on NVMe drive?

[Drystoner]

I own a WD Blue SN550 which has my OS installed. Currently I have about 20% free of my 1TB drive.

I'm wondering if it's still the case that there'd be any noticeable performance impact in games and programs if I let it go to say 5 to 10% of free space?

[Kiwi {JESUS IS LORD}]

i only have 5% free space on mine since its laptop seems fine

[nullable]

Well there's nothing magical about 20% free being an optimum minimum amount of free space. And everyone has an opinion about how much free space their ought to be.

Less free space can have some impacts, but it's not as if there's a hard line where the SSD goes from running well to running as fast as a floppy disk. Having the drive extremely full may not be "optimal", but it's not crippling either.

There's nothing particularly wrong with using the space if you need it. I certainly wouldn't worry about it if it was a temporary situation. But at a certain point there's an argument to be made to get more space. Using 95% of the drive would certainly be a time to think about it. If not then I guess technically you still have 4% of headroom if you're a 99% full type of person.

And on top of all that, if you use too much and you're not happy with the performance, delete some stuff, problem solved. That's the great thing about this, you can try it and see for yourself.

[Agent]

10% free would still be fine. Once you get to 5% or below I think you'll notice a few hiccups.

[plat]

Many nvm-e have over-provisioning built in. My 980 Pro has 465 GB usable out of 500 GB. The consensus is 10-15% free on top of that.

[_I_]

its best to keep 10%+ free on any drive
if its lower than that its time to replace and upgrade the drive

[nullable]

Originally posted by plat:

Many nvm-e have over-provisioning built in. My 980 Pro has 465 GB usable out of 500 GB. The consensus is 10-15% free on top of that.

Well that's more to do with the drive being sold as having 500 billion bytes of usable space and using the standard base10 SI definition for Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera.

In actual system usage we use base2, not base10, and those values don't align perfectly. The larger the drive the greater the disparity. The reality is we co-opted using the SI prefixes decades ago and while there are binary prefixes I think at this point human beings as a species would rather die than switch over. No one is ever going talk about Gibibytes aside from trivia.

465.6612873077392578125 * (2^30) = 500,000,000,000 bytes

You're not losing usable space to over-provisioning. A 500GB HDD will still format to 465GB for the same reasons, base10 to base2 has some consequences.

https://www.gbmb.org/gigabytes

Although now that I written this I'm not entirely sure if you believe that 465GB means you have 35.339GB in over-provisioning and that explains the missing space or where just making some other statement I misinterpreted.

[_I_]

that from formatting it
it loses some data space for its file/index tables

[plat]

Originally posted by _I_:

that from formatting it
it loses some data space for its file/index tables

Originally posted by Snakub Plissken:

You're not losing usable space to over-provisioning. A 500GB HDD will still format to 465GB for the same reasons, base10 to base2 has some consequences.

https://www.gbmb.org/gigabytes

Although now that I written this I'm not entirely sure if you believe that 465GB means you have 35.339GB in over-provisioning and that explains the missing space or where just making some other statement I misinterpreted.

Thanks!

[Carlsberg]

Regardless of drive type, if your running out of sapce its clearly not big enough. You need another, or you have software you don't use.

[Joke]

For the OPs' case, since it's the drive where windows is installed, I would still keep a good amount of free space on it.
- Windows updates tend to make windows grow.
- The swap file for virtual memory can grow.
- Windows will write all sorts of log files
- etc.

Having disk space suddenly run out will cause problems, so better keep some space free.

About over provisioning:
===================
I read this somewhere, and it makes sense to me so I believe it's true:

If an SSD is advertised with a size that is an even base2, so 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB, 2048GB etc., then it has no built in over provisioning.

If an SSD is advertised with a size lower than thew even base2, so typically 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1920GB etc., then it has built in over provisioning.

The memory chips are always sized as an even base2, and a 480GB drive and a 512GB drive will have the same amount of memory on the pcb.

[Ghost Robertson]

When buying an SSD you should always buy plenty more than you think you'll need, it's very easy to fill drives.

[Illusion of Progress]

Originally posted by Joke:

I read this somewhere, and it makes sense to me so I believe it's true:

If an SSD is advertised with a size that is an even base2, so 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB, 2048GB etc., then it has no built in over provisioning.

If an SSD is advertised with a size lower than thew even base2, so typically 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1920GB etc., then it has built in over provisioning.

The memory chips are always sized as an even base2, and a 480GB drive and a 512GB drive will have the same amount of memory on the pcb.

Interesting if so (I always wondered why 256 GB, 512 GB, etc started being "replaced" by 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB for a while), but even that second scheme seems to no longer be in use so it's probably not a good distinction anymore even if it was true. Now most drives seem to be just 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, 4 TB, 8 TB, etc.

[Jessie]

Used 100% of my drive space once, running Linux. Couldn't boot until I had cleaned up some space. If you are getting to 90% drive usage, get some more space.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

60gb free space should be enough.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

On all drives, it is always best to abide by the 10-15% free space rule.

It is OK to fill up a given drive on a temporary basis, but not good to keep it filled too much for the long term.

However unlike a hdd, an ssd can still manage to properly trim the drive even when free space is very low.