I'm configuring an order of iMacs to be used in a work environment and my first choice is to get 256SSD and edit all photos/videos off of external drives and use the internal SSDs for only the OS and applications. How much free space do SSD drives need to run optimal?
Thanks.
According to Apple documentation, you need at least 9 GB of available space on the startup volume (as shown in the Finder Info window) for normal operation—not the mythical 10%, 15%, or any other percentage. You also need enough space left over to allow for growth of the data. There is little or no performance advantage to having more available space than the minimum Apple recommends. Available storage space that you'll never use is wasted space.
Due to the nature of SSDs and either having TRIM enabled or not (as in OWC SSDs), they need extra space, not only for GC (garbage collection) as data are written/wiped in blocks. Below are some links; the first one suggested that at least 25% be kept available so the performance does not suffer:
http://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives /
Thanks for all of the replies.
1. What I'm looking into now, is if individual programs, such as Adobe Premiere, After Effects, etc. benefit from additional space on the SSD. Anyone have any idea?
2. We might also partition the SSDs and install Windows and some Windows programs on it. Overall, we calculated the storage space necessary for Mac OS, Mac programs, Windows and Windows programs and we have over 100GB free space on a 256GB SSD. Are there any Windows specific issues with needing more space or anything else we should be aware of?
Thanks.
Can't answer the Windows question as I do not use it. However, the general recommendation for Macs (for spinning drives - not sure about SSDs, but the same might apply) is that if you do a lot of video/graphics editing and rendering, you should have at least as much empty space as the temp files in your project for the machine to be able to render efficiently. Since I can easily amass 100 - 150 GB of temp files for a one hour HD project, I keep much more empty space than average available. Not sure how well SSDs work with constantly erasing large files - which is what I do when I'm done with a project - and how it effects their longevity. You might want to address that with an SSD mfr. When I got a new iMac earlier this year, I decided to go with the "tried and true" and opted for a regular spinning 7200 rpm drive because of my video/graphics/arts work. I have an SSD on my MBP and have not found a measurable speed difference in rendering a video when I tried it - it is much faster booting up and launching apps though.
Are there any Windows specific issues with needing more space or anything else we should be aware of?
You may wish to ask and/or post in the Windows Compatibility forum area. It's where the Mac/Windows users hang out.
How much free space does an SSD drive need to run optimal?
