I know the conventional wisdom is to make sure you never completely fill your SSD (always leave 10-20% free, write-leveling or something like that) but what about if you've partitioned your SSD into
- C – 50GB
- D – 180GB
- E – 15GB
and after loading Win7, programs and data it looks like this
- C – 50GB / 20GB free
- D – 180GB / 0.5GB free
- E – 15GB / 10GB free
Is it a problem for that D drive to be almost at capacity? There's still roughly 10%+ free overall on the drive, will the SSD be able to do it's write-leveling using the free space of the whole drive or will the space devoted to the D partition be adversely affected?
Best Answer
The wisdom is about never completely filling a partition. It has nothing to do with anything special about SSDs or wear-leveling. In fact, it applies less to SSDs because fragmentation doesn't bother them nearly as much as it bothers rotating media.
You actually can't fill an SSD because the capacity it reports to you is less than its actual capacity. It reserves space for wear-leveling in ways that you cannot detect or affect.