Should I leave some SSD capacity empty for best performance?

Matt asks if he should leave a certain percentage of his SSD empty for best performance.

Question by Matt from Canada | Answered by in Storage on

SSDs slow down as they get filled with data, so I was wondering if there any percentage of the drive I should leave unused to keep my drive working at full speed?

I have an 850 EVO 250GB.

Hi Paul,

First off, thanks for the question!

SSDs come from the vendor with a certain level of overprovisioning (OP) baked in. Most drives are set somewhere around 7% capacity, this means your 240GB drive is 256GB and so on. Samsung Magician recommends users set OP to 10% for heavy workloads, but for typical gaming, the default settings work fine.

Should I leave some SSD capacity empty for best performance? | TweakTown.com

If your performance issue arises after filling the drive past 75% capacity, I would honestly look towards migrating to a higher capacity solution. No level of overprovisioning will help an SSD that's full of data.

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:10 pm CST

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