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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Notebook Hardware
Best SSD for Macbook Pro Mid 2010
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<blockquote data-quote="MacInWin" data-source="post: 1850417" data-attributes="member: 396914"><p>Lots of really bad information in that article. SSDs performance, compared to spinners, is really so much faster that any slowdown that might be caused by the drive having to do some data juggling is trivial. Spinners need a lot of space on them because they try to find a contiguous space to write the file, and if they cannot find that space, the heads have to move a lot more to spread the fragments of the file all around the discs. All those head moves take time, making the response time slow. That is why defragging a spinner can improve performance. </p><p></p><p>SSDs don't have to move any heads, don't really care about contiguous space because any address is equally accessible and fragmentation is meaningless. In fact, SSDs deliberately spread data around for what is known as wear-levelling, as the memory locations can only be used for a certain (really high) limited number of times. So the data is spread around to keep from hitting any one address too many times.</p><p></p><p>As a result of all that, SSDs actually don't need as much free space as do spinners. Generally you need to leave 10% free on a spinner, but an SSD will function quite nicely all the way to about 3%, although I would leave a bit more on a boot drive if your RAM is heavily used so that swapping always has room on the drive. Also, when the drive is idle, the controller does the cleanup of any partially used memory blocks or pages so that when the next write comes along, space is optimized and ready. </p><p></p><p>I will give the article some slack, it's seven years old. Technology moves on.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MacInWin, post: 1850417, member: 396914"] Lots of really bad information in that article. SSDs performance, compared to spinners, is really so much faster that any slowdown that might be caused by the drive having to do some data juggling is trivial. Spinners need a lot of space on them because they try to find a contiguous space to write the file, and if they cannot find that space, the heads have to move a lot more to spread the fragments of the file all around the discs. All those head moves take time, making the response time slow. That is why defragging a spinner can improve performance. SSDs don't have to move any heads, don't really care about contiguous space because any address is equally accessible and fragmentation is meaningless. In fact, SSDs deliberately spread data around for what is known as wear-levelling, as the memory locations can only be used for a certain (really high) limited number of times. So the data is spread around to keep from hitting any one address too many times. As a result of all that, SSDs actually don't need as much free space as do spinners. Generally you need to leave 10% free on a spinner, but an SSD will function quite nicely all the way to about 3%, although I would leave a bit more on a boot drive if your RAM is heavily used so that swapping always has room on the drive. Also, when the drive is idle, the controller does the cleanup of any partially used memory blocks or pages so that when the next write comes along, space is optimized and ready. I will give the article some slack, it's seven years old. Technology moves on. [/QUOTE]
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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Notebook Hardware
Best SSD for Macbook Pro Mid 2010
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