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How much free space does an SSD need to run good?

S

stanw

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I calculated that the amount of space I need for my drive with the OS and applications is about 121GB. I use external drives for all of my data and am thinking of getting the 256GB SSD. How much free space will I need for it to run smoothly?

Thanks.
 
stanw said:
I calculated that the amount of space I need for my drive with the OS and applications is about 121GB. I use external drives for all of my data and am thinking of getting the 256GB SSD. How much free space will I need for it to run smoothly?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

I have 240GB SSD in my iMac with 65GB free, it runs perfectly but I like to keep an eye on the amount of available space.
 
I have a solid state hard drive on my pc and if i put more than 50% of data on it it gets really slow. I would not recommend increwsing data over 50% so if you want to add 500 gigs of files get a one tetrabyte ssd hard drive and if you want a full tetrabyte which is more than 95% of users use i would recommend a 2 tetrabyte ssd hard drive.
 
I routinely have less than 10% free space on my rMBP SSD and it only really slows down when that number goes below about 5%.
 
My 2012 512Gb SSD in my rMBP still runs at full speed with 66% full. I think you are good to at least 90% capacity before you would notice any speed difference.
 
stanw said:
I calculated that the amount of space I need for my drive with the OS and applications is about 121GB. I use external drives for all of my data and am thinking of getting the 256GB SSD. How much free space will I need for it to run smoothly?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Either get the 512 or the 2TB fusion. 256GB is too small!
 
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Unless you dive pretty deep in the white papers you never really know how much an SSD is over-provisioned to begin with. It is not uncommon for SSDs marketed as "240GB" to actually be 256GB, with 24GB already set aside for over-provisioning. You'd really just have to Black Magic your drive at different capacities to figure it out...
 
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Just upgraded 2 lap tops with EVO 850 500's - it's worth the extra $100 to double the storage, even with external drives. Super Fast!

El Cap boots in 15 seconds!
 
Got a crucial m4 256gb in Mac mini 2011. If free space drops below ~35gb (about 15% of the drive) the write speed goes from 260mb/s to 50mb/s. Read from 400+mb/s to 70mb/s. I aim for at least 20% free to be safe at all times, you can definitely notice when the speed drops!
 
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