What do you mean by ‘to preserve longevity of the hardware’? Am I damaging my iPhone by filling up all its storage?
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iPhone 12 Pro Max I have about 9GB storage left out of 128 GB and my iPhone 12 Pro Max becomes laggy when multiple apps are open in the background
- Thread starter jordysak
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What I read was, that is only applies to an SSD hardware, and I assume flash memory storage on smartphones and SD cards are not identical to an SSD. I could be wrong.
But generally I don’t believe we could damage our smartphones by filling up the storage. I often do this to my previous smartphones, none have issues.
You’re likely facing different problems that causing your phone behaving like that.
They use the same NAND flash chips. Actually, NAND flash used on SD cards are probably of the cheaper variety.
More free space helps lower write amplification ergo less P/E cycle wear.
To be honest though, storage longevity probably won't be an issue for most. The device will likely be too slow or lacking in features before it runs out of P/E cycles.
Some of the following might cause a "Duh!" response, but are important to understanding. I'll try to keep those facts to a minimum.
en.wikipedia.org
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The >=20% (or so) free space suggestion has two reasons.
• HDDs have spinning discs, blocks/sectors placed in rings with an actuating arm that moves the read-write head over these rings as needed. The outer rings are, obviously, larger, thus hold more data, more files and/or larger files. Because of this, the read/write head shouldn't need to move as often -- especially if there's no gaps or file fragmentation. As the drive is filled, it is forced to use smaller and smaller rings, only able to accommodate small files or file fragments thus forcing the drive to seek out all of the data from multiple areas of the discs.
• When a drive is empty, it can probably place data anywhere it wants without needing to separate, fragment, files and other data. As files are written and erased, gaps appear. At first, this isn't a problem because there's plenty of other space and no need to cram data in these gaps. However, as more data is added, eventually, the only thing left are the gaps. To fix or reduce the problem, defragmentation was an added option, telling the OS to rearrange the file data the best it could to make data seamless. One of the exceptions would be, for example, a NAS used for movies and music storage because data isn't added, deleted, or modified often -- basically, what @rui no onna mentioned and was highlighting in regards to the 20% free space argument being an absolute guideline.
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When you think of performance, you primarily relate it to the amount of RAM, right? RAM is important, providing a temporary, very high-speed storage medium that can keep up with high-speed processors. However, offering that speed means sacrificing capacity. Sometimes, not everything can be stored in RAM. In such cases, how do we compromise most effectively, efficiently? Overflows can be placed on SSDs, HDDs, and other persistent storage media, although, they don't offer as much speed. So, slower but still functions. Not ideal but probably acceptable. What if there is plenty of RAM? Does that mean things will always be fast? Not absolutely, but we can try to make that happen. Even if there are plenty of open RAM blocks, iOS and many other operating systems still utilize virtual memory, a.k.a. paging. The OS will move infrequent and low-priority data to the SSD, etc because it shouldn't be a hinderance, plus creates more free RAM for future needs. Of course, this does equate to less free space on your persistent storage media as well as relies on its performance. Additionally, the system is perfect. Sometimes, data priority is wrongfully marked or misgauged or files that haven't been used for awhile are now extremely active, either remaining on the lower performance media or temporary unavailable as it is copied back to RAM.
Not damaging per se, more of not allowing the device to operate its effectively as designed -- probably not enough to notice within the product's typical, preferred lifespan though.
Wear leveling - Wikipedia
As a drive contains more data, that is, less open blocks, it is forced to re-use the same portion of blocks when adding new data. This limited space essentially prevents full wear leveling.
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The >=20% (or so) free space suggestion has two reasons.
• HDDs have spinning discs, blocks/sectors placed in rings with an actuating arm that moves the read-write head over these rings as needed. The outer rings are, obviously, larger, thus hold more data, more files and/or larger files. Because of this, the read/write head shouldn't need to move as often -- especially if there's no gaps or file fragmentation. As the drive is filled, it is forced to use smaller and smaller rings, only able to accommodate small files or file fragments thus forcing the drive to seek out all of the data from multiple areas of the discs.
• When a drive is empty, it can probably place data anywhere it wants without needing to separate, fragment, files and other data. As files are written and erased, gaps appear. At first, this isn't a problem because there's plenty of other space and no need to cram data in these gaps. However, as more data is added, eventually, the only thing left are the gaps. To fix or reduce the problem, defragmentation was an added option, telling the OS to rearrange the file data the best it could to make data seamless. One of the exceptions would be, for example, a NAS used for movies and music storage because data isn't added, deleted, or modified often -- basically, what @rui no onna mentioned and was highlighting in regards to the 20% free space argument being an absolute guideline.
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When you think of performance, you primarily relate it to the amount of RAM, right? RAM is important, providing a temporary, very high-speed storage medium that can keep up with high-speed processors. However, offering that speed means sacrificing capacity. Sometimes, not everything can be stored in RAM. In such cases, how do we compromise most effectively, efficiently? Overflows can be placed on SSDs, HDDs, and other persistent storage media, although, they don't offer as much speed. So, slower but still functions. Not ideal but probably acceptable. What if there is plenty of RAM? Does that mean things will always be fast? Not absolutely, but we can try to make that happen. Even if there are plenty of open RAM blocks, iOS and many other operating systems still utilize virtual memory, a.k.a. paging. The OS will move infrequent and low-priority data to the SSD, etc because it shouldn't be a hinderance, plus creates more free RAM for future needs. Of course, this does equate to less free space on your persistent storage media as well as relies on its performance. Additionally, the system is perfect. Sometimes, data priority is wrongfully marked or misgauged or files that haven't been used for awhile are now extremely active, either remaining on the lower performance media or temporary unavailable as it is copied back to RAM.
Just a comment. Paging/virtual memory on iOS doesn't work the same way as it does on, say, desktop macOS, Linux or Windows. iOS scraps data that is paged out unless the app specifically writes it to a cache whereas the aforementioned desktop OSes write it to a swap file on SSD/HDD.
Thanks for the correction. I didn’t recall that difference.
I assume, you’re referring to...
About the Virtual Memory System
Guidelines for improving the performance of memory-related code.
developer.apple.com