Best/Cheapest 256GB SSD?

[Phil]

yeah you do not want to fill a SSD it starts to kill off its performance.

Id personally try to keep 20% free at all times.

I tried filling Sandforce drives to 95% full, I didn't see a significant performance drop.

On what SSDs did you notice a performance drop?

[ViciousXUSMC]

I tried filling Sandforce drives to 95% full, I didn't see a significant performance drop.

On what SSDs did you notice a performance drop?

None that I have tested personally I just remember reading its bad for a SSD to keep it near full as it cant quite function optimally if its under heavy use.

Perhaps not so much the performance but the life of the product suffers. Im sure its more proven on the older SSD's where as new ones may have tried to correct for these shortcomings.

If I recall SSD' benchmarks used to be run with the disk fresh and one after it was made full just so you can see how a SSD will perform in its used state, but GC and Trm are now a reality when they were more of a dream back then.

[BeastRider]

I've seen quite huge load speed increases in MMOs..Particularly World of Warcraft which is my main game..So I'm guessing the increased or rather decreased load time the SSD would provide depends heavily on the type of game..IMO of course, I don't have any personal experience on this, just a video on youtube of a WoW player's load times on HDD and when he switched to SSD.. Oh and take a look at the Intel 320 300GB, IDK how much it costs though..

[chimpanzee]

None that I have tested personally I just remember reading its bad for a SSD to keep it near full as it cant quite function optimally if its under heavy use.

Perhaps not so much the performance but the life of the product suffers. Im sure its more proven on the older SSD's where as new ones may have tried to correct for these shortcomings.

If I recall SSD' benchmarks used to be run with the disk fresh and one after it was made full just so you can see how a SSD will perform in its used state, but GC and Trm are now a reality when they were more of a dream back then.

The less free space, the harder the controller would struggle to find whole erasable block when there are new write request, it would impact both endurance and performance(increase in WA factor). This is how the whole SSD thing works, no brand can escape that. In fact, the original SF used 17% OP to compensate its compression which would leave more holes. It was later reduced because it bump up their $/G price.

If the usage is read heavy, it doesn't matter though and even 100% is not going to hurt read operation.

[taxmantoo]

None that I have tested personally I just remember reading its bad for a SSD to keep it near full as it cant quite function optimally if its under heavy use.

Isn't it better to leave unallocated space when you partition it than to allocate all of it but not fill it with data?

[namaiki]

Isn't it better to leave unallocated space when you partition it than to allocate all of it but not fill it with data?

It makes no difference to the SSD which only sees files.

[HTWingNut]

Isn't it better to leave unallocated space when you partition it than to allocate all of it but not fill it with data?

With Intel on a new drive if you partition it leaving free space at the end of the partition, it's supposed to add that to the overprovisioning pool. This supposedly helps maintain peak performance, reduces overall wear, and increases the lifetime of the drive. IMHO, for a typical user, this is unnecessary, although sacrificing 3-5GB of space is a personal choice.

Other SSD's have not made such claims, and think it's unique to Intel. Also you can apparently do this after a secure erase, but you don't get the same returns as you would if you did it with a factory fresh drive.

I tried filling Sandforce drives to 95% full, I didn't see a significant performance drop.

On what SSDs did you notice a performance drop?

Previous Samsung drives would suffer from this, as would original OCZ drives. I had a 256GB Samsung previous gen drive for a little while and did some testing and not only did performance decrease greatly, it never corrected itself even after a secure erase. 4k read/write was worse than a 7200RPM HDD. Suffice it to say I did manage to get my money back.

I know Intel does not suffer this from what I've seen so far, nor any of the other current gen products.

Also check out this great write-up

How To Prevent SSD Degradation Without TRIM

But I think a lot of this stemmed from lack of trim.

A full drive can lead to excessive wear of the cells not occupied since even regular wear leveling can't maintain a 90% full drive by manipulating the data efficiently.

[Cloudfire]

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...00,2908-4.html

[chimpanzee]

I have my doubt on the figures. Read speed should not be affected, GC or no GC. What I am seeing is the speed go all over the place and a read speed lower than write speed is simply unbelievable.

[Phil]

And 4K speeds are more interesting than seq. speeds in my opinion.

Please mention the source out of courtesy for the website and our readers.