Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

bo-waleed

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 15, 2009
606
20
How is your experience with this ?
Do you always have %25/%50 free space or no ?
 

Chevysales

macrumors 6502
Sep 30, 2019
355
335
From my understanding with the 2019 16" and now the current late 2021 16" the ssd's that are 2tb seem to be faster then the 1tb's from my own use of Blackmagic and Aja to measure.

I only checked after reading about it in a few different articles which always seemed to show 2tb ssd from Apple faster than the 1tb offering.

I tried with both empty drives and also with the drives having approx 350 gbs of data on drives.

This is hardly any type of scientific test but was just for me to see any differences.

Using both Intel and Apple chipsets.
And was between 4 machines and only those SSD combinations but both with 64gb memory and either the 2.4 for the intel 2019 16" and the 10/32/64 for 2021 Max chipsets.

YMMV
 
Last edited:

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,460
9,326
The more free space left the faster performance on MBP, True or False ?
Absolutely false. Storage is just where your bits are kept. Free space has very little to do with the machine's speed, which is mainly determined by the CPU.
 

MRxROBOT

macrumors 6502a
Apr 14, 2016
779
806
01000011 01000001
Absolutely false. Storage is just where your bits are kept. Free space has very little to do with the machine's speed, which is mainly determined by the CPU.
Actually, it’s well known that SSDs tend to slow down as they fill up. While the CPU may not be directly effected, the SSD can in fact impact performance. This will largely depend on the type of work you do on the machine of course. Premium NVMe drives will of course take less of a hit then their SATA counterparts.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Chevysales

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,460
9,326
Actually, it’s well known that SSDs tend to slow down as they fill up.
Lots of people say that on the internet, but I'm not convinced it's accurate. Here is a guy who ran some actual tests on various SSDs and he didn't detect any meaningful slow down.

 

MRxROBOT

macrumors 6502a
Apr 14, 2016
779
806
01000011 01000001
Oh yes, epicgametech. Great resource. Try this articles from anandtech.


"For drives on the market today that don't already prioritize consistent IO, it is possible to deliver significant improvements in IO consistency through an increase in spare area. OCZ's Vector and Samsung's SSD 840 Pro both deliver much better IO consistency if you simply set aside 25% of the total NAND capacity as spare area."
 

davegoody

macrumors 6502
Apr 9, 2003
375
95
Nottingham, England.
Lots of people say that on the internet, but I'm not convinced it's accurate. Here is a guy who ran some actual tests on various SSDs and he didn't detect any meaningful slow down.

Oh, it's certainly accurate. Far more so with Spinning Rust (HDDs) than SSDs of course. The problem is that all OS's swap out to (slower) disk as RAM resources diminish, the faster the drive, the more seamless the experience. YEARS of experience of PCs, Macs, and all sorts of devices that handle disk swaps regularly benefit from as fast a drive as possible. Note that SSDs, as they fill, CAN get slower, as the controller is doing a lot more work housekeeping than it has to do with an empty drive.
 

MRxROBOT

macrumors 6502a
Apr 14, 2016
779
806
01000011 01000001
I found this to be a pretty good layman's explanation, hopefully this helps you understand. The problem with the tests you linked above is that it was using spare SSDs doing nothing but writing benchmarks. Try running those benchmarks when you're also running the OS on the same drive or playing a game and the results would be vastly different. Below is a snippet of an article written by Aaron Mickunas at Riot Games.

When you save a file to your computer, your SSD has to do some (very) quick math to determine where on the drive the data should be saved. It figures out where the next empty space on the drive is, and it fills it with the new data. Simple enough, but it can get a little hairy.

When data on a block is changed, the SSD needs to recalculate over and over again. Meaning, although the data already exists in a block somewhere on the drive, in order to change the data, it needs to find another blank block and move it there. Why? Because it cannot write data to a block unless that block is empty. If the SSD tried to change data that already exists in a block, it would destroy the data.

write-amplification-cc-30.png

Write amplification: a sliding block puzzle for your SSD.
Music Sorter at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

Writing new data entails copying the data from the existing block to a new, empty block, but with the changes included. The drive then marks the previous block as ready to be overwritten, so it can be used as an empty space for the next file that needs it.

For a single file, this process doesn’t really mean anything. But in a game, when things change on-screen very often, or in bulk when you load a saved game, it needs to happen on a much larger scale all at once. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of data rewrites. If the process is slowed down by even a fraction of a fraction, it adds up, even if the SSD can do all of this in a matter of seconds.
 
Last edited:

MRxROBOT

macrumors 6502a
Apr 14, 2016
779
806
01000011 01000001
How is your experience with this ?
Do you always have %25/%50 free space or no ?
Currently have 50% free. If I get down to 25% I will try to offload data to my thunderbolt NVMe SSDs and if that's not feasible, it'll be time for an upgrade (I do not see this happening any time soon).
 

Reggaenald

Suspended
Sep 26, 2021
864
798
Absolutely false. Storage is just where your bits are kept. Free space has very little to do with the machine's speed, which is mainly determined by the CPU.
Well, have you ever used a Mac with a full SSD? It can grind to a halt. I’m not sure if it’s just Swap that makes this happen, but it does.
 

Nathan King

macrumors regular
Aug 24, 2016
205
716
Omaha, NE
Yes, it can impact performance due to the architecture of the drive. Look up “SSD Queue Depth” for some interesting reading.
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,263
13,360
Back when SSD's were a new item, we were told that it was pointless to "defrag" the data on an SSD.

Yet I'm wondering if an SSD with the data entirely "spaced out" all over-the-place can take longer to access than does one with the data grouped together in an "electrically logical" manner....?
(shows you how much I know...) :cool:
 
  • Like
Reactions: MBAir2010

MBAir2010

macrumors 604
May 30, 2018
6,975
6,354
there
last year the 265gb macbook air was used to transfer movies,
and there was 6GB free, and very slow.
after the transfer where that had 29Gb of space free,
the MBA was back to normal quickness.
 

MBAir2010

macrumors 604
May 30, 2018
6,975
6,354
there
Back when SSD's were a new item, we were told that it was pointless to "defrag" the data on an SSD.

Yet I'm wondering if an SSD with the data entirely "spaced out" all over-the-place can take longer to access than does one with the data grouped together in an "electrically logical" manner....?
(shows you how much I know...) :cool:
The manner to retrieve data was different,
The older drives used a sensor that searched for data as a record album
while the ssd drives are micro chips.
i think they store info in specific areas of the flash drive
so no defragmenting is needed
(i think, and shows ya how much i know as well)
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.