SSD, How Much Free Space To Keep?

I got a 240gb intel 335 SSD for black friday and I've read that the more space taken, the slower it'll perform.

That being said, how much free space should I be looking to keep?

At the moment, I only have files I find essential on my SSD and everything else on the HDD I replaced with the SSD in an enclosure.

After formatting and what not, I have 223gb available of the 240gb.


Between windows 7, microsfot (word, excel, powerpoint), drivers, windows updates, and my school stuff (approx 700mb), I have 177gb fre, which means I have 46gb of stuff.

Subtracting school and microsoft, that's about 44 gigs on just windows 7 + updates and drivers? Does that sound like much and is there anything non essential that I can cut out?

Would like to run XIV (when 2.0 hits) and possibly League of Legends (if I begin playing that) on the SSD (or would running them in the usb 3.0 HDD be fine w/o a performance drop?) w/o lowering performance due to too much space being taken up. I'll assume XI will be safe to run on the HDD with usb 3.0 speeds?

Basically any info about SSDs would be appreciated, thanks

well if you want you can read my really bad research document about storage virtualization which involves SSDs and HDD comparisons

but with that size of an SSD you'll want roughly 48 GB of free space give or take 10GB before you'll start seeing a performance hit. (from what I heard and read. you'll want about 20% as your free space) Some people say 10GB minimum. but I'll stay with the 20% rule.

i suggest buying a 64gig SSD put your OS on it with all drivers for GPU, sound card etc and Microsoft office programs. then use your 240 for games and use your normal HDD for music, videos etc. personally i leave 20% of the drive empty. defragging the drive and running Ccleaner's will keep its speed up aswell.

edit: made a mistake and didnt make my self clear should have said Defragging the HDD and running FreeSpaceCleaner on SDD will keep your drives speeds up.

Should probably mention that I'm using a laptop by the way

I got this from a site, not sure if it will help, and also from what Ive heard and read can agree with what Volk said about ideally you want to keep around 20-30% free.


I normally just have the OS a few apps that need to load up in seconds right away and maybe a couple of games I want loaded up fast or maps loaded up fast, the rest go into a cheap HDD. Ive used like 60-70gbs out of the 200+ I have and im sure I could cut like 20 out of it. Managing your space is pretty important for those. Speand a lot of money you want your investmetn to last a while :)

Do this and you'll destroy the SSD. When using an SSD, you should disable defrag since that can damage your SSD's write performance. Use TRIM instead (Google that if needed).

Oh, looks like TRIM is built into my Intel Toolbox. Thought it was something I was going to have to download on my own

Yea, my uncle decided to move back in, so things have been going a bit smoother this semester. Power has been on since August, etc. Water coming back soon (or so he says lol)

^

Aye, defrag operations are taboo with SSD's. I couldn't tell you the technical details as to why, but that's something I remember being warned about when I got my first SSD earlier this year. I reinstalled Win7 a couple days ago, and Windows automatically turned off the defrag scheduling for the SSD, while leaving it on for the 2 internal HDD's I also have. You might want to verify that it's turned off for you.

If you haven't already, make sure that your SATA controller is set to AHCI mode (as opposed to IDE or RAID) in your BIOS settings to fully realize SSD speed capabilities, and to allow your SSD's TRIM support to function. AHCI should be set before installing Windows, but there's a method that may or may not get Windows to play nicely if you have to go in and change the setting after the fact (I couldn't get it to work the first time I installed it) >>> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

And if you have some time to look through it, here's a good tech article that discusses different ideas about optimizing SSD storage (page 2 shows you how to determine within Windows whether AHCI is enabled without having to shutdown and check the BIOS settings) >>> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911.html

no, don't defrag SSD...

You should't worry about space/performance issues with an SSD. SSD works differently from HDD, this is because HDD performs better at outer circles of the platter, as it tries to write/read in the inner circles the transfer rate will decrease.

All of this doesn't apply to SSD as it has a different mechanism, which is why also you shouldn't defragment it.

as far as I can tell most newer consumer grade laptops don't offer an "ide mode" and unless they have more than 1 hdd capacity wouldn't have "raid" (if the BIOS still has it listen, then shame on their engineering department).

you can't switch those modes because of a driver issue, if you can change the controller driver manually with a bootable utility it in theory should work.


Nobody mentioned it (or at least I didn't see it, skimmed over the thread) a 240GB drive isn't really 240GB when formatted.

It's a marketing thing, they get away with it because 240,000,000,000/ 1000^3 = 240, but: 240,000,000,000 / 1024^3 = 223.517


blame lax laws, and shrewd business practices.


Personally I've heard the "free space" line, I wouldn't worry about it until you're over 75% personally.

Don't defrag your drive, it gives no benefit and only causes unnecessary stress on the drive. That's the line I've gotten several times, and it makes sense, I'd be willing to bet there's other reasons too.


Personally (since my laptop has 2 hdd's in it) I set up my secondary with multiple partitions, and put the page file and my downloads and recylcing bin on the regular HDD to give less wear and tear, but tbh I don't notice much of a performance increase, probably due to what I did (sure it slows it down) and that my laptop came with 2 WD blacks 7200rpm. I'm limited to Sata2 speeds as well.

I also have my laptop dual booting with XP, if you try such a thing I'd install XP first, unless you want to play with easy bcd for a bit. also (which I found out) 7 and XP use the same name for the page file, requiring them to be on separate partitions (couldn't but them both on the "buffer" I didn't dare try to *** with it, I mean it's the same name, same type of file, and only in use when the OS is running, should be able to share :P oh well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/CategoryIntelligenceArticle.aspx?articleId=291#topic6

I followed this guide, and one other when setting up my SSD, but if using windows 8 alot of that can be skipped, since windows 8 has native ssd support. Will turn TRIM on, disable defrag on ssd and things of that nature.

As far as the 75% of used space issue, I think I read on Toms hardware that the ram modules access speeds slow down when the drive is near 75% or more full. I specifically read up on my Vertex 3 drives and that was a known issue. I saved my OS to ssd and just used the 1tb hd for programs. ***is a speed beast that way.

The most annoying ***ever. Can you imagine how annoyed I was to get 1tb drive and only have 932gb or something free space......./cry

I had a 128 gig corsair force SSD, and I noticed considerable performance degradation as I got over 120 gigs of usage as well as several system side effects I had never seen before. Stepped up to the 256gb Corsair SSD and got my space utilization back to about 60% now and it works great

When I built this computer I contemplated getting an SSD to load windows and some games faster. But now my steam folder alone is at 456Gb and I think its size is outpacing the progress of new SSDs. I ended up just getting a 2tb black caviar, but I regret not having a SSD every time I have to load up Europa Universalis 3 or crusader kings 2, paradox interactive seems to love their loading screen.

After re-reading the OP, I realized that he had his HDD in a USB enclosure. I generally recommend installing programs to a usb hdd mainly because the hdd drive letter can (and will change) if you hook up any other usb storage peripherals (flash drive, i'm looking at you), which will cause programs installed there to be non -accessible. If the drive is left plugged in at all times its moderately safe, but if you remove it, or switch it to another usb port with another usb device plugged in, the drive letter can switch. So, programs installed to D:/Program files, will be unusable when the HDD becomes E:.

can always use multiple drives and keep the long loading games on the SSD, takes more to manage but worth it imo.

can always change it in the registry, and there's ways for it to look for it, but I forget them off the top of my head.

Not sure I want to meet the person who needs a SSD for their porn folder.

I lol'd good on this one.

Steam is a digital game distributor, it downloads and saves everything into the "steam" folder. They have a lot of sales around the holiday so it's pretty easy to pick up a lot of games for cheap. Since it's all digital tho, I've found it easier to store them on my hard drive than to re-download them. If my internet were faster I'd consider just deleting them, but it's not.

Additionally the size of games has increased drastically over the years. I remember playing S.W.A.T back in the day thinking 1gb for a game was a lot, but you can easily find a game that will take up 10-30GB.

You have 2tb ssds but crap internet?

They don't even make 2TB SSDs. Caviar Blacks are normal hard drives.