I always hear people saying you need to leave ~20% of the space on your SSD free otherwise you'll suffer major slowdowns. No way I'm buying a 4TB drive and then leaving 800GB free on it, that is ridiculous.
Now obviously I know it's true. I have a Samsung 850 Evo right now that's 87% full, and with a quick CrystalDiskMark test I can see some of the write speeds dropped to about a third of what they are in reviews.
I'm sure that the amount of performance loss varies between drives, which to me would be a big part in deciding what I'd rather buy. AnandTech used to test empty and full drives as part of their testing suite (here, for example), but they don't have any reviews for the more interesting drives that came out in the last couple of years, like 990 Pro, SN850X, or KC3000.
Is there anyone else doing these kinds of benchmarks, for an empty and filled drive? It would be a lot better knowing just how bad filling a drive is instead of throwing 20% of it away (some suggest to keep 50% full at most) as some kind of rule of thumb.
So that you can have an ssd that's at 100% speed...
For the same price you could have much more storage and faster speeds.
Also there are several techs like directstorage for having a gpu stream assets directly from the ssd, why cripple that?
btw hdds are rarely used for cold storage, cold storage means inactive/offline and is normally tape.
Ah, yes, the tape which nobody uses. Right.
Are you going to buy less SSD and an HDD. So that you can use the always severely slower HDD more, so that you don't have to, gasp, lose 1% read speed off the SSD, every day? Or, to not lose some write speed, particularly random writes, (because that's where a penalty would be at at) but without really writing anything? No comment.
If by directstorage you mean the technology that isn't even in meaningful use yet, but also only makes a clear difference on SATA SSD as of now? I have no comment on that one either.
Obviously if you're at 75% and up it'd be a good time to look around for another drive. but sitting there, not daring to fill it up anymore because you're scared? That is pointless, pedantic and stupid.
why would the reads be crippled?