SSD wear and free space to mitigate it

[Bucic]

My usual resource didn't help https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives

 

Here's the situation for my disk:

[ [|||||||||||||||||||||||||--] [||||----] [||||------] ]

| : occupied

- : free space

[ ] : partition

 

SSD uses free space to spread the natural wear of memory cells.

My question is:

Can SSDs use any portions of free space anywhere on the disk (including e.g. unallocated space) for the purpose?

[sobek]

Depends on how smart the firmware is but in principle yes, the data can be spread in junks all around. Remember that there was no requirement for data to be adjacent on a HDD as well (with limitations), it was just beneficial because it would decrease the jumping of the heads.

[Pilotasso]

Youll upgrade much sooner before needing having to worry about it. Mine is 3.5 years old and has always been used as an OS start drive with swap file on it.

[Bucic]

Depends on how smart the firmware is but in principle yes, the data can be spread in junks all around. Remember that there was no requirement for data to be adjacent on a HDD as well (with limitations), it was just beneficial because it would decrease the jumping of the heads.

From all what I've read my impression was the same - that usually SSD firmware operates on low level i.e. knows everything on every hardware memory cell while disregarding partitioning etc.

 

Youll upgrade much sooner before needing having to worry about it. Mine is 3.5 years old and has always been used as an OS start drive with swap file on it.

May-be, but frankly keeping ~15% free space to significantly increase the disk longevity is rather easy, even if it was the 'per-partition 15% required'.