SSD: keep unallocated space?

I've a new Acer Aspire ES1 15 Windows 10 laptop with 256GB SSD. I've heard that with SSD it's best to leave as much free space as possible, to extend drive working like. Need I keep an unallocated "partition" for this?

3 Answers

First, modern SSDs good with wear leveling and you do not have to be afraid to use them. As long as you are not running something like heavy continuous Web application databases on your SSD, it's not worth worrying about. Just use it like normal. Read this to find out just how many writes you have to do to kill an SSD.

Back data up on them as you would any mechanical HDD.

Second, most SSDs are overprovisioned internally. Your 256GB SSD likely has something like 256+16GB of actual space in it. The SSD controller hides this from the OS, but it will internally use that extra room when needed.

SSDs can write to free, erased space faster than rewriting existing data. As long as the SSD and OS have TRIM support (all do these days), deleted data will be "erased" and future writes will be fast. If your SSD approaches something like 90% capacity you may see slowdown. It won't become unusable, so planning in the sense of making a blank partition is overkill. When your drive gets full, get some data off to an external drive or cloud service and things should get back to normal once you free up space.

Untrue.

What you are referring to is probably calledOver-provisioningwhich is taken care of by the SSD firmware. The operating system does not see this provisional part. It is common to see 7 per cent over-provisioning in many SSDs.

You do not need to do anything and can use the entire disk (or at least what Windows thinks is the entire disk).

No, an unallocated partition would not help extend the life of the SSD. Each cell in an SSD wears down slightly every time it is written to, so that after some number of writes (perhaps thousands, perhaps hundreds, perhaps only dozens, it varies by the model), the cell is too slow to be useful. The SSD firmware makes up for it by exposing only a portion of the useful cells to the operating system. That is, an SSD with 256 GB visible in the OS might have enough cells for 300 GB. The drive firmware assigns writes all over the drive in cells that are marked unused by the operating system, so that the apparent speed of the drive does not drop noticeably. Some SSD firmwares let you change the amount of overhead cells, like Samsung Magician. But a partition would not do the same thing for you.