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Premise: I think (hoping to be right) that a SSD with 1% of free space will have a short life because the write operations will concentrate on the same few cells).

Now, consider the two following scenarios:

  • a SSD disk with two partitions of the same size, the first one with
    39% of free space and the second one with 1% of free space;
  • the same SSD disk with a single partition with 20% ((1%+39%)/2) of free space.

I have two questions:

  1. Is the latter one better, or they are equivalent? (if the SO matters, I'm manly interested in Windows platform)
  2. Does the answer to the previous question remain the same even if one of the two partitions is crypted (for example with TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt)?
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  • SSD's have built in wear leveling and OS uses trim, this negates any issues you are asking about.
    – Moab
    Aug 11, 2018 at 15:26
  • have a look at this question for more information about the top premise, and this question of mine where ((most likely)) constant data fill-ups lead to pre-fail corruption.
    – confetti
    Aug 11, 2018 at 18:58

2 Answers 2

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The base primise is probably falsse, but ..

Q1: Equivalent.
There is no separation between the partitions and which flash calls get used on a SSD. On a rotating disk there is a direct mapping from sectors in a partition to specific sectors on the rotating rust. On a SSD theis is not the case. There is a translation happenign between the block that the computer thinks it is accessing and to where it currently is mapped on the SSD.

Q2: I am not familiar with how VeraCrypt works. Please ask that in a seperate question (Stack exchange works on one question per post). I would guess it makes no difference ifyou write encrypted data to disk, or any other data to disk. But this is a guess.

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Your premise is incorrect on any modern SSD. The SSD controller/firmware uses a wear leveling algorithm to move things around so that write operations are spread across the whole drive more-or-less evenly. This is a bit easier when the drive is not full, but generally the drive will reserve some spare area to help with this. Performance will be impacted, but longevity will not.

Q1: They are equivalent, regardless of OS. The drive's firmware has no knowledge of what partitions you may have set up, it only cares if data on a given block is valid or not valid (deleted via the trim command). Note that the OS itself may care, since some OSes need some scratch space on a particular partition to work with, but the drive will not know or care.

Q2: This also will not matter. From the drive's perspective, data is data, and it doesn't care what it may be, or if it's encrypted.

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