Completely filling pendrive?

[4klips]

I have a 8 GB pendrive and I have some useless data on it which I don't care loosing. But it has around 240 MB free space and the windows shows that the pendrive is almost full and shows a red bar instead of blue. So, if I leave it like that forever completely filled. Will it damage my pendrive?

Actually I have windows 10 and some drivers and softwares on it.

[Eigenvektor]

Windows simply shows a red bar when the amount of free space is below a certain percentage to warn you that you're running out of space. SSDs may get slower as you fill them up, but otherwise having a full drive won't damage it. It's only flipped bits, it's not like it has to physically hold something.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

5 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

SSDs may get slower as you fill them up, but otherwise having a full drive won't damage it.

Actually, you will damage the SSD. As you fill an SSD, you start to run into write amplification because the controller has less space to work with for TRIM and garbage collection, resulting in increased writes as the contoller has to juggle cells and blocks to compensate for the lack of working space. If you fill an SSD more than 75-80%, you will reduce the remaining write life at an accelerated rate (thus damaging the SSDs write life) and the SSD will take a performance hit. 

[4klips]

1 hour ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Actually, you will damage the SSD. As you fill an SSD, you start to run into write amplification because the controller has less space to work with for TRIM and garbage collection, resulting in increased writes as the contoller has to juggle cells and blocks to compensate for the lack of working space. If you fill an SSD more than 75-80%, you will reduce the remaining write life at an accelerated rate (thus damaging the SSDs write life) and the SSD will take a performance hit. 

Its a flash drive (Pendrive). So do I need to worry?

[Eigenvektor]

2 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Actually, you will damage the SSD. As you fill an SSD, you start to run into write amplification because the controller has less space to work with for TRIM and garbage collection, resulting in increased writes as the contoller has to juggle cells and blocks to compensate for the lack of working space. If you fill an SSD more than 75-80%, you will reduce the remaining write life at an accelerated rate (thus damaging the SSDs write life) and the SSD will take a performance hit. 

I would argue that reducing a drive's life span and damaging it is not quite the same thing. Yes, if you fill it up and continue to constantly write and overwrite files it'll probably die sooner than normal. If you fill it up once and just use it to carry around data (maybe occasionally updating files) I don't think you need to worry too much.

 

As OP said, this is a USB stick, not a SSD. Most of those won't have TRIM or wear leveling to begin with, so it's life span is limited in any case if you constantly write to it.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

3 hours ago, 4klips said:

Its a flash drive (Pendrive). So do I need to worry?

Probably not. I was responding only to the claim on SSDs. Eigenvektor pointed out that one scenario where an SSD wouldn't be prematurely worn out (btw, prematurely wearing something out through abuse--overfilling it, in this case--is damaging it) is by filling it up but not writing to it anymore. That would be pushing your luck, though.