does having too little disc space on ssd slow it down

#DOES HAVING TOO LITTLE DISC SPACE ON SSD SLOW IT DOWN PRO#

Read speeds are mostly unaffected by the phenomenon. New writes from the host will have to wait for these erase operations to complete, and you see a slow-down in performance.īy the way, this performance variability only affects write speeds. Most of the time, this process works pretty transparently to the user, but when the drive has very little spare space to play with, to use as sort of a scratch pad during these data movements, the whole process can slow down. This movement of data is known as garbage collection. This is much easier to understand if I could draw it on a whiteboard for you, but the essence is that once a certain number of pages within a block contain invalid/deleted data, then the remaining valid data will have to be moved somewhere else so that the block can be erased and prepared for new, incoming data. That means that when files start getting deleted, the SSD is going to have to do some work to clear space for new writes. We can write a page at a time, but erase a block at a time. You can probably see the complication here. These blocks are often known as 'erase blocks' because this is the smallest unit that the SSD can erase at one time. these pages are arranged in 'blocks', where a block will contain 256 or 512 pages. The SSD is so lightning fast because it can write this entire 16kB at once, as opposed to your HDD, which writes the data a bit at a time. The other factor is that your SSD can write data a 'page' at a time, where a page will be something on the order of 16kB.

The reason this OP is needed is that unlike magnetic media, NAND Flash must go through an erase operation before it can be re-written.

Someone mentioned this in an earlier post, but over-provisioning is simply extra NAND flash, which is used by the drive for operations like garbage collection and wear leveling, but it's not addressable by the host computer. For SSDs, particularly notebook grade SSDs, the reason is limited over-provisioning ('OP'). It is true that you probably don't want to run your HDD or your SSD very close to full. Thanks for the plug on our Crucial drives, I think! I'll let that 'even Crucial Drives' thing slide right by.

#DOES HAVING TOO LITTLE DISC SPACE ON SSD SLOW IT DOWN PRO#

Most people do not need PRO drives, they are fine with EVO drives, or even Crucial Drives, saving some money and still getting performance that everyone will love.

Does having too little disc space on ssd slow it down