Wonks wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 7:22 am
It’s what’s out there on the web, and it was posted this year, but as always, the easiest to find info on the web is not always the most accurate, so if anyone knows better, please say so.
SSD performance in relation to allocation is a very complex topic. It depends on the hardware used (type of storage, memory, cache and chipset etc.) as well as any over-provisioning and the type of access. The "75% thing" is a bit of an internet myth. I believe it's from an Anandtech test from back in 2012. One type of drive, 12 years ago! SSD technology has moved on since then. You can also find examples of tests showing no performance degradation at 99% full! If you understand over-provisioning it's possible to adjust those values, and hence performance, but not all drives will respond the same. It's quite possible that a nearly-full drive will perform perfectly well if there is enough space for the OS to work and for the data reallocation processes.
adrian_k wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 7:52 am
As I noted above I’ve just upgraded from a 128GB drive to 500GB. I used to have about 20GB free and can confirm anecdotally that performance on non-audio related stuff like opening large Word docs seems faster,
That may well be due simply to the improved performance of the new drive.
In conclusion, you cannot make blanket statements on this topic, but if you get to 80 or 85% full, you should probably be looking to upgrade. That's just common sense isn't it?
Agree, though it just seems to be a collection of various Windows tools* grouped together for easy access, I can see where it could be handy (maybe especially, "Health Check", which gets rid of little bits of flotsam and jetsum scattered throughout the hard drive).
I wonder if it is one of those things to disable when recording audio (likely to cause an interrupt?), or when running large projects with demanding VSTis.
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With HDDs, the data can end up being distributed over all parts of the disk drive platters, so the heads have to move a lot to pick up data from non-contiguous files. That slows things down a lot as it takes time for the heads to physically move.
With an SSD, it’s simply addressing different memory locations in the solid state NAND memory, and one address is as good as another in terms of speed.
Posts:5284Joined: Fri Jan 10, 2003 12:00 amLocation: Hampton Roads, Virginia, USA
Home of the The SLUM Tapes (Shoulda Left Un-Mixed), mangled using Cubase Pro 14; W10 64 bit on Intel i5-4570 3.2GHz,16GB RAM;Steinberg UR28M interface; Juno DS88; UAD2 Solo/Native; Revoice Pro
Posts:5284Joined: Fri Jan 10, 2003 12:00 amLocation: Hampton Roads, Virginia, USA
Home of the The SLUM Tapes (Shoulda Left Un-Mixed), mangled using Cubase Pro 14; W10 64 bit on Intel i5-4570 3.2GHz,16GB RAM;Steinberg UR28M interface; Juno DS88; UAD2 Solo/Native; Revoice Pro
It's worth realising that there is a difference between a physical drive and the filesystem on that drive. It's the filesystem that gets fragmented. More recent filesystems reduce the amount of fragmentation as they're going along.
With a good old spinning hard drive, there is no difference between overwriting existing data, and writing into empty space. With an SSD overwriting existing data has more of an overhead. Consequently, SSDs have the trim command.
When files are deleted, the filesystem marks those blocks as 'not in use'. Trim tells the drive which blocks are not in use, and the drive deletes them. To keep an SSD working well, trim should be run regularly.
