Intel SSD Question

[Imabigmac]

Does anyone know if Intel ssd's leave a portion of the drive without any data on them? My 120Gb says it's only got 111Gb, so does this mean that if I fill it all the way up I wont lose much in the terms of speed? 

[TheNinjaNextDor]

Your SSD is 120gb, but Windows reads it as 111gb because of a different way of measuring data. So no.

I dont know the terms, but yeah 111 is the limit.

[Evostatic343]

Does anyone know if Intel ssd's leave a portion of the drive without any data on them? My 120Gb says it's only got 111Gb, so does this mean that if I fill it all the way up I wont lose much in the terms of speed? 

you should be fine up until the drive is full. you shouldnt see any noticeable speed dips. intel has slightly slower but more reliable drives and should stay at around the advertised speed for al long tiem

[Imabigmac]

you should be fine up until the drive is full. you shouldnt see any noticeable speed dips. intel has slightly slower but more reliable drives and should stay at around the advertised speed for al long tiem

I always thought that you needed to leave like 10-20gigs free because the ssd has to move stuff around, but when completely full has to delete and rewrite to HDD or something. 

[Evostatic343]

I always thought that you needed to leave like 10-20gigs free because the ssd has to move stuff around, but when completely full has to delete and rewrite to HDD or something. 

ya thats why its like that but im saying that his speed wont slow if he fills it too the 111 mark

[Imabigmac]

ya thats why its like that but im saying that his speed wont slow if he fills it too the 111 mark

Okay, I get there won't be a huge decrease but will it be noticeable? 

[Evostatic343]

Okay, I get there won't be a huge decrease but will it be noticeable? 

i did it on my 320 series and i noticed nothing. you will be fine if you have a 320 series or higher. (in theory)

[Imabigmac]

i did it on my 320 series and i noticed nothing. you will be fine if you have a 320 series or higher. (in theory)

it's a 530,

 

okay thanks

[Atlantisman]

Intel does leave some extra nand in their drives to take the place of bad nand when needed. But this is why intel's drives come in 120gb - 240gb - 480gb sizes and not 128 - 256 - 512, like most other companies.

 

What you're experiencing though is not intel reserving part of your drive, its how your OS is reading the drive and reserving a little section of it.

 

Btw all hard drives do this reserving thing, that is why a 1TB drive is really around 931gb, a 3tb drive is around 2.7TB and so on.

[hojnikb]

EVERY SINGLE FLASH device has a portion of it's space dedicated for nonuser data. Its usually used for wearlevelling, garbage collection and badblock managment.

[BrightCandle]

There are two things at play with regards to the space. The first is that for whatever reason hard drives and solid state drives come listed as GB defined in powers of 10, that is 10^9 bytes. So 120GB is 120,000,000,000 bytes. Yet Windows (and anyone sensible) uses power of 2 GB, which is 2^30 which is 128849018880 bytes. So that accounts for a 7.3% loss of space reported within Windows, which comes out to 111.76GB. This is also the reason HDD of 1TB come out as 931GB, its because the manufacturers are selling it with dubious counting.

 

SSDs also come with additional space on the drive which is hidden from you. Its purpose is to give the drive some room to shuffle around its pages so it can always have erased pages available for avoiding write amplification and to improve performance. A 120GB drive is at least a 128GB worth of flash, the extra is there to ensure you can go up to the full capacity without decreases in performance or problems with additional wear. HDD do not do this, they have no reason to.

[hojnikb]

SSDs also come with additional space on the drive which is hidden from you. Its purpose is to give the drive some room to shuffle around its pages so it can always have erased pages available for avoiding write amplification and to improve performance. A 120GB drive is at least a 128GB worth of flash, the extra is there to ensure you can go up to the full capacity without decreases in performance or problems with additional wear. HDD do not do this, they have no reason to.

 

Actually, SSDs (and other flash devices) unlike HDDs actually have 128GiB of raw space (or whatever the capacity). They just use the 7% loss, that happens because of conversion for above mentioned things.

[3VIL_G3NIUS]

A 120GB drive is at least a 128GB worth of flash, the extra is there to ensure you can go up to the full capacity without decreases in performance or problems with additional wear. HDD do not do this, they have no reason to.

HDDs do have extra sectors, for replacing any that go bad. They just don't have to shuffle things around cause they don't wear out with writes.

[FizzyFantom]

There are two things at play with regards to the space. The first is that for whatever reason hard drives and solid state drives come listed as GB defined in powers of 10, that is 10^9 bytes. So 120GB is 120,000,000,000 bytes. Yet Windows (and anyone sensible) uses power of 2 GB, which is 2^30 which is 128849018880 bytes. So that accounts for a 7.3% loss of space reported within Windows, which comes out to 111.76GB. This is also the reason HDD of 1TB come out as 931GB, its because the manufacturers are selling it with dubious counting.

 

SSDs also come with additional space on the drive which is hidden from you. Its purpose is to give the drive some room to shuffle around its pages so it can always have erased pages available for avoiding write amplification and to improve performance. A 120GB drive is at least a 128GB worth of flash, the extra is there to ensure you can go up to the full capacity without decreases in performance or problems with additional wear. HDD do not do this, they have no reason to.

This is completely correct and explains this frequently asked question. Thanks for the concise explaination