Optimal Empty Space Left On System Drive?

[DBK]

I wouldnt be asking if there were things I could easily delete but I've been doing that for the last few months and now im at the point where the space being taken up is by important stuff.

Anyway is there a certain percentage of your system drive that should be left open for optimal pro tools use?

Right now I had an internal 512gb SSD as my system drive with 20gb free. My external drive has 750gb and only 40 gb free.

I realize im getting low, but is it to the point where pro tools performance will start lacking soon?

I know the COMMON belief is that you should leave space open, but Ive heard tons of conflicting stuff. So once and for all, whats the word on how much space should be left on your system and external drives? For a SSD and a spinning drive.

[Craig F]

external/working drives: 50% is the point were you need to start cleaning things up/moving to offline storage drives
system drive: 20GB is getting tight, 10% open would be minimum comfortable space (assuming you are not using your system drive for recording)

[nikhilmulay]

On a hrad drive it doesn't matter.. You could be 99% full and not see much of a difference in performance.
On an ssd, things are different though, you need to keep some empty space to maintain performance.. It's not massively important though as all ssds have some portion of their actual capacity reserved for this very purpose which the user has no access to. You could keep some 10-15% empty and you should be good.
I have never suffered any noticeable loss of performance by keeping a hard drive near full.
It's good to keep space on system drives though.. Say 10gigs should be fine.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by DBK

I wouldnt be asking if there were things I could easily delete but I've been doing that for the last few months and now im at the point where the space being taken up is by important stuff.

Anyway is there a certain percentage of your system drive that should be left open for optimal pro tools use?

Right now I had an internal 512gb SSD as my system drive with 20gb free. My external drive has 750gb and only 40 gb free.

I realize im getting low, but is it to the point where pro tools performance will start lacking soon?

I know the COMMON belief is that you should leave space open, but Ive heard tons of conflicting stuff. So once and for all, whats the word on how much space should be left on your system and external drives? For a SSD and a spinning drive.

On ssd's you want to have a minimum of 20% free so for that 512 gig drive that's about 100 gig.

[Carl Kolchak]

It used to be the case that PT was not that happy if the system drive had less than 50% free.

These days it seems to cope pretty reliably down to about 10% - 15%

This is one of the down sides to computers having larger, and larger capacity system drives fitted - 50% of a 500GB drive was 250GB wasted space. 50% of a 1TB drive is a heck of a lot of wasted space.

For the system drive, it may be worth partitioning it, to a modest size for the OS, leaving a larger space for storage (i.e. never to be used for recording audio, which would actually be worse than recording to an unpartitioned system drive, and completely defeat the purpose of the optimisation).

For external drives, again partitioning the drive can be beneficial, maintaining one partition for recording active projects, and another for storage of inactive projects (i.e you would NEVER try recording to more than one partition on any drive, at any time).

[DBK]

Everything im hearing is conflicting and opposite to what I thought I knew. Ive always heard SSDs are the ones that dont need space and moving drives need more.

Also the last 3 posts contradict craigs first one. I would have loved to just take craigs word for it until the 3 posts following said otherwise.

Pretty much in the same boat I was when starting the thread haha. Ive been aware of everything that everyone has said, I was just trying to figure out what the right thing to be aware of was. This is bascially going how a discussion about this usually goes haha. No offense to the people who have answered, still thanks.

But seeing as how we're on the topic of recording to a system drive, you all seem to be in agreeance that it shouldnt be done. What can happen? When I run pro tools off my external compared to my internal SSD it just doesnt work nearly as good. My external is a 7200rpm drive btw.

[Darryl Ramm]

The advice about not recording to a system drive goes back to days when a fast HDD might max out at ~100 IO/sec and 100-200 MB/s. Modern tiny little M.2 PCIe SSDs in a laptop can deliver over a hundred thousand IO/s and 1.2 GB/s or more of IO. So uh yes with a system drive like that you can be damn sure you can record most anything to the system drive. Even a SATA III SSD will often let you do that, but it depends on what drive and what session, # tracks, sample rate, what the CPU load is and and if the system is otherwise properly optimized, etc.

Talking about an "SSD" is nearly useless since an "SSD" includes everything from some USB2 connected POS drive up to a monster enterprise class PCIe3 NVMe card, with huger variation with performance And there are some SSD brands and models I would not touch with a ten-foot pole. Folks need to get specific about what SSD they are using, and how it is attached if you want to discuss drive capabilities, optimization, etc.

The main reason you need excess space on a HDD is for things like future needs, temp file space etc., so you always need at least that on an SSD. How much do you need... that is mostly up to *you*. What apps might you add in future? How much spare space do you need to copy temp files around? How many and how large crash/core dumps do you want the system to be able to handle? My 1TB drives (all SSD) are 20% overpovisioning (see below) but still have at least 100GB free on the disk partition. In the big picture storage, even most SSD storage, is very low cost. The computer works for me not the other way around, I do not ever want to think about not being able to do something because it is out of free disk space.

But SSDs are much more complex than a HDD and need to be over-provisioned to provide spare pages so the controller can replace worn ones, and to provide a reserve of pre-erased pages to provide good write performance. SSDs will by default have something like 7% over-provisioning (you can't normally see that excess capacity but it is there), I would normally want to provide more like 20% for any drive that is written to much. You can either increase the over-provisioning using a utility like Samsung's Magician (on Windows for Samsung drives) or by leaving that much extra capacity unformulated on the drive. It is a better to do that than just leave extra unused space on the drive partition... which means you also want to leave space with the partition for temp file needs, future growth etc. So think of it as treating that partition excess space as you would need to for a HDD and the over-provisioning outside that as specific to the SSD.

For drives like sample drives that are effectively read only, I'd leave the over-provisioning at the manufacturer's default (the hidden 7% or so amount you cannot normally see).

Leaving more capacity on a HDD to ensure good write performance is mostly a a thing of the past done to avoid/mitigate file system fragmentation. Modern file systems are really so good (well maybe not NTFS) that fragmentation really just is not the issue it once was. Still if you are repeatedly running a HDD up to the last few percent and then down and then back up again you might end up with slower performance from fragmentation, but with sensible use and and I don't know guessing here... 20% free I would be surprised if you should see a practical issue.. and you want that 20% or whatever free anyhow for other practical reasons. Fragmentation is not something to worry about on SSDs (do *not* try to defrag those drives.).

Do not skimp of tiny SSDs, you want a large SSD with all that over-provisioning goodness to help give you good write performance and long life. Some models of SSDs have noticeable increases in their drive performance as capacity increases as the number of NAND chips inside the drive increases giving higher overall aggregate bandwidth. Maybe worth avoiding 128GB and 256 GB drives if you are not sure. The last four SATA SSDs I've brought have all been 1TB. I'll probably never buy another SATA SSD, the next ones will all probalby all be NVMe M.2 drives.

Stop all this nonsense about partitioning anything.... The reasons you want to partition a drive is to support multiple boot partitions, support different filesystem formats on one drive, or for backup recovery reasons. If you do not have a clear need there then don't use more than one partition per drive, at all, on any drive type.

If you want to try to record audio to the system drive on a HDD (OK still not recommended) or SSD do *not* add another partition to the drive for that. On a HDD you are goign to slow down it's performance, on an SSD you are just making things more complex than needed for no purpose at all.

[Craig F]

not recording to the System drive stems from having to fix system that were recording to the system drive and the system folder got overwritten when the rig locked up
granted those lockups don't seem to happen anymore but what if it's just a mater of time

for working drives I've seen to many people try and start a session with only a few GB left on a drive
and I don't like big drives for working drive. the bigger the basket of eggs the bigger the mess when the basket fails

[albee1952]

My 2 cents;
1-I would NOT record to the system drive(under normal circumstances) as the system drive gets the most abuse, and is the easiest to corrupt(whether by overwork, overheat, a virus/trojan/malware attack or some piece of crap software that trashes the system). Recovering a system drive is pretty painless if you use drive imaging/cloning. But, if your sessions are on the system drive, they are seriously at risk(which maybe is not important to you)

2-SSD drives, in general, have limited read/write capability. and, most are considerably larger than the claimed size so that failed sectors automatically get replaced with those extra "backup" sectors(and the user gets no indication that anything even happened).

3-I love an SSD as a system drive and use them in both my machines. But my sessions are on separate 7200 rpm spinners and are backed up across multiple drives, both internal and external(if a session doesn't exist in 3 places, its not backed up)

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by albee1952

My 2 cents;
1-I would NOT record to the system drive(under normal circumstances) as the system drive gets the most abuse, and is the easiest to corrupt(whether by overwork, overheat, a virus/trojan/malware attack or some piece of crap software that trashes the system). Recovering a system drive is pretty painless if you use drive imaging/cloning. But, if your sessions are on the system drive, they are seriously at risk(which maybe is not important to you)

2-SSD drives, in general, have limited read/write capability. and, most are considerably larger than the claimed size so that failed sectors automatically get replaced with those extra "backup" sectors(and the user gets no indication that anything even happened).

3-I love an SSD as a system drive and use them in both my machines. But my sessions are on separate 7200 rpm spinners and are backed up across multiple drives, both internal and external(if a session doesn't exist in 3 places, its not backed up)

And let me add one more from my own experience:
My backup drives are from two different companies so if there's a rash of failures from one company hopefully the other company's drives should be okay.