> You’re also missing an important factor: Many drives now reserve some space that cannot be used by the consumer so they have extra space to work with. This is called factory overprovisioning.
I think it is safe to say that all drives have this. Refer to the available spare field in the SMART log page (likely via smartctl -a) to see the percentage of factory overprovisioned blocks that are still available.
I hypothesize that as this OP space dwindles writes get slower because they are more likely to get bogged down behind garbage collection.
> I doubt most consumers ever encounter this condition. Someone who is copying very large video files from one drive to another might encounter it on certain operations
I agree. I agree so much that I question the assertion that drive slowness is a major factor in machines feeling slow. My slow laptop is about 5 years old. Firefox spikes to 100+% CPU for several seconds on most page loads. The drive is idle during that time. I place the vast majority of the blame on software bloat.
That said, I am aware of credible assertions that drive wear has contributed to measurable regression in VM boot time for a certain class of servers I’ve worked on.
I think it is safe to say that all drives have this. Refer to the available spare field in the SMART log page (likely via smartctl -a) to see the percentage of factory overprovisioned blocks that are still available.
I hypothesize that as this OP space dwindles writes get slower because they are more likely to get bogged down behind garbage collection.
> I doubt most consumers ever encounter this condition. Someone who is copying very large video files from one drive to another might encounter it on certain operations
I agree. I agree so much that I question the assertion that drive slowness is a major factor in machines feeling slow. My slow laptop is about 5 years old. Firefox spikes to 100+% CPU for several seconds on most page loads. The drive is idle during that time. I place the vast majority of the blame on software bloat.
That said, I am aware of credible assertions that drive wear has contributed to measurable regression in VM boot time for a certain class of servers I’ve worked on.