Will filling up my Surface hard drive space make it run slower?

[ABsmoove]

I have a i5 Surface Pro 3 128GB and I have 31GB of music that I want to put on it. 71GB of my hard drive space is already taken up. My dad believes that if I put all my music on Surface that it will run slow. Has anyone experienced a slower Surface after filling up the hard drive space?

 

[Kellzea]

re:

Computers need resources to run, some of these resources are virtual and use available storage space. For eg, the system can use HDD space as ram to help the system run better. Having full drives is NEVER a good idea, regardless of the fact the system needs the space, the actual drive it's self will have a harder time operating when full.

Stick a 64gig low profile usb drive in. Keep music and movies on that.

 

[Ed Boland]

re:

Your dad is correct!

 

[vzw8830]

Re:

Toss a 64gb class 10 SD card in for your music and call it a day

 

[xandros9]

Not really, but keep at least a couple GB of breathing room at the bare minimum and that should be relatively OK.

 

[stephen_az]

I have a i5 Surface Pro 3 128GB and I have 31GB of music that I want to put on it. 71GB of my hard drive space is already taken up. My dad believes that if I put all my music on Surface that it will run slow. Has anyone experienced a slower Surface after filling up the hard drive space?

Sorry but the identified best answer is not correct. Filling up a drive is a problem with mechanical drives that then have to cycle to find stuff, access swap files, caches, etc.. It really is not 2004 - it 2014. Windows allocates the space for optimizations and caches at start up and once allocated there is nothing intensive about access on an SSD. As long as space exists for the caches, there is no concern and as it stands Windows 8.1 caches on Surface devices are tiny in comparison to previous versions of Windows.

In fact, sticking in a 64GB card is far more likely to slow certain things down because they do not run at the same speed as the SSD, memory, or other motherboard components. Yes, they are great for storage but moving frequently accessed things to such a card is not best for performance and never will be. MicroSDXC cards also, in my experience, have an annoyingly high failure rate, whether it be in my SP, SP2, SP3, original Surface RT, and my DSLR. Long and short of it is they have pushed the limits of technology. Yes, I do use a 128GB card and have used 64GB cards in the past but that is purely for storage, not any perceived performance improvement - the opposite effect is closer to the truth. BTW, if you want to test this, load a large complicated file on a card and on the SSD and see how long it takes to open from each.

Don't waste your SSD space but ask don't be concerned about performance hits from a past era with older technology. You would have to get down to a few GB of free space before you before it would be a potential problem. BTW, you can also set the essential cache to a fixed size which eliminates the prospect of using up its space....

 

[berty6294]

Yep, what stephen_az said. Only time you're going to run into an issue is if you fill the drive completely.

 

[kpfogey]

Having a full ssd will definitely slow down performance. It may not be a huge difference as what it could be in the mechanical hard drive days, but there is a difference. anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op explains it much better than I ever could, but the tl;dr version is you want to stay under 75% capacity for ssds to maintain optimal performance

 

[BaritoneGuy]

The Anandtech post is referring to something called the "spare area" which is different than free space. As long as the spare area is sufficient then it does not matter how much of the active partition is in use. The SP3 has a very good quality SSD in it so I wouldn't worry about the free space on the C drive.

 

[BaritoneGuy]

Feel free to fill it up stephen_az has the best answer. As for the post by kpfogey the web page he is referencing is something else again, not the free space on the active drive C. I replied to his post with a bit more detail if you like.

 

[CliveSinclair]

I agree with the idea of putting music and movies on a microSD card. That way you can transfer easily if needed - to another, or new machine.

 

[Zulfigar]

I have a i5 Surface Pro 3 128GB and I have 31GB of music that I want to put on it. 71GB of my hard drive space is already taken up. My dad believes that if I put all my music on Surface that it will run slow. Has anyone experienced a slower Surface after filling up the hard drive space?

It'll start really be noticeable when you have 3-5 GB left, but until then, you'll be safe.

Either way, put the music on an SD card to preserve the limited space on your Surface.

 

[Cleavitt76]

Feel free to fill it up stephen_az has the best answer. As for the post by kpfogey the web page he is referencing is something else again, not the free space on the active drive C. I replied to his post with a bit more detail if you like.

Actually, kpfogey is correct. Consumer grade SSDs (and most enterprise class models) can absolutely take a major performance hit if you get close to filling them up. It's not that they won't still run fast *most* of the time, but they will be inconsistent and have moments of random delays. The last line of the AnandTech article is pretty clearly stated...

"Whatever drive you end up buying, plan on using only about 75% of its capacity if you want a good balance between performance consistency and capacity."

SSD manufacturers set aside some amount of unusable/hidden flash space to reduce this phenomenon, but in consumer level drives it's not enough to eliminate it. The percentage of unusable space varies from one manufacturer to the next. The "spare area" referred to in the AnandTech article is their term for any free space including free space, un-partitioned space, and space hidden by the manufacturer. Most consumer level SSDs will start to be affected somewhere between 75 and 90% full depending on the amount of hidden space the manufacturer sets aside, firmware logic, and the volume of writes.

I wouldn't worry about it too much since a slow SSD is usually still faster than a "fast" HDD. However, it's something to keep in mind when you get to that 75% full threshold. At least you will be aware in case you have easy opportunities to store some large rarely used files elsewhere. The MicroSD slot on the SP3 is great for that kind of thing.

 

[kg4icg]

SSD's don't work like mechanical HDD's so the slow down effect would be negligible. Only slowdown would be if you start losing nand cells on the SSD, other than that, no problem.

 

[anon(8150199)]

TLDR: sure, filling up ANY storage device is not a good idea.

 

[CliveSinclair]

Windows file system has improved dramatically in the last 20yrs or so. In the past when writing a large file to a rotating HDD, Windows would look for the first bit of empty space, then the next bit of empty space and so on - until your large file was probably fragmented all over your HD.

Many of today's file systems attempt to preallocate longer chunks, or chunks from different free space fragments, called extents to files that are actively appended to. This largely avoids file fragmentation when several files are concurrently being appended to, thus avoiding their becoming excessively intertwined.

This doesn't eliminate fragmentation, but has helped to reduce it - when possible. Also you don't have the mechanical 'slowness' of traditional HD's on the Surface Pro 3.