raptor88 wrote:
For example, say one fills up the SSD with data so there is just a small amount of unused space left on the SSD. The writes will be forced to happen over and over in the small unused space which will shorten the life of the SSD. Not to mention that fact that Windows can have problems if there is a "small amount" of unused space left in the C: partition.
No, I don't think this is how it works. You are right about "wear leveling", but what you are describing is exactly the opposite, right? Very "not-level" wearing, all in one place. It doesn't work like that, the SSD will relocate blocks to ensure that the flash is worn evenly, thus "wear leveling".
There are several ways to do this including "over-provisioning". You buy a 250GB SSD, there is a little more than that capacity on the device. So there is alwasy an unused sector, even when the drive is full. This means that if you re-write a sector, it doesn't get written over, it moves. Then the old one is marked "empty". Thus the entire SSD is cyclically used evenly as you write more and more data. This is why SSD's are sometime rated in TBW (Terabyte Writes) meaning you can write, for example, 400 TB of data to the drive before any of the flash wears out, but it should all wear out at the same time.
It's not true that writing and re-writing to the same sector (part of the drive) wears out that part of the drive faster, because sector number has no relation to physical location in SSD, it can be located anywhere the SSD thinks is best.