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All iPads Stupid question does a iPad slow down if you use close to all the storage space like a pc hard drive ?
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Theoretically, I believe the answer is yes, but not nearly to the extent of an old spinning Hard Disk Drive.
When stuff on an iPad starts failing without an error messages, the first thing I check is available disk space. And a few times, that has been exactly the problem.
How full close to full are we talking here? Because for launching/running apps to fail solely based on lack of storage, there'd have to be pretty much no free storage space left. I have (not recently, but in the past) use an iOS device with probably on 1 or 2 GB left and while I could barely save a video and couldn't download and install OS updates without connecting to iTunes, everything that was already installed still functioned as normal. If we're talking like completely full then the device is effectively useless anyway because you're probably going to need to save or download something at some point.
Theoretically, I believe the answer is no. How could the operation of the machine depend on free storage space? iPadOS does not use virtual memory, like a computer.
This is the right answer. the vast majority of file systems slow down on writes the closer they get to 100% full because they need to work harder to find the free space. This isn’t anywhere near the problem it used to be on spinning disks as flash can cope with random write work loads far better than HDs ever could.....but it will still happen. It will manifest itself as sluggish performance, crashing app etc.
If I’m not mistaken about how flash storage/SSD works, in a nutshell, the more full it is the harder it is to find free space which is needed for reading/writing data. Maybe iOS works differently.https://www.howtogeek.com/165542/why-solid-state-drives-slow-down-as-you-fill-them-up/
I have a cousin whom despite my recommendation chose to purchase the lowest storage space model of an iPhone a couple of years ago. Periodically she stops receiving group messages because her device is completely full - or so she claims, during which time she frantically tries to offload photos to google photos since she's too cheap to pay for additional icloud space. Drives me bonkers sometimes not being able to rely on text communications to go through in group with her.
This may not be the same thing as what OP is asking but to me the real issue is don't go to zero because somehow some way there will be issues if the device is unable to create free space on its own to do what it needs to do.