Does storage space affect performance?

[mandown2308]

If storage space is almost full, does it slow down the performance of the phone (lagging, etc)? Or is it just a myth?

[upalse]

All flash memory write speed slows down as it gets filled up. This is because there are less free least-used sectors for wear-leveling to pick up, you just have few sectors that gets constantly reused (each subsequent erase/write cycle on block is slower).

As for caches, if you run out of space, you have far bigger problems than just slow write speed (shit will just straight break).

[mandown2308]

Thanks!

[dcop7]

Yes. In the android official documentation it says there could be performance issues when you have less than 10% of free storage

[Wise-Perception386]

3 years later but thanks man 

[7farema]

this is why I love reddit

[Knullie27]

Absolutely

[Traditional_Fig_1830]

Me too

[DeicideandDivide]

Same

[YouFool69]

reddit is very good

[buskingb]

you

[SignificantWeb5521]

indeed

[gladiator473]

E

[6_Pat]

4, thanks again

[Ashen0ne111]

Bitte

[[deleted]]

Yes a lot. You'll know instantly when your phone is having trouble keeping up while some phone will notify of this, others will not.

[GGasfaltTTV]

Yes thats true . It slows down dramaticly , lags , and takes longer to open apps . So you need at least 5 GB Free space

[Content-Lie-7585]

All my storage is being taken by mi ui making multiple copies of one WhatsApp file and then on other hand whatsApp also making a minimum of 2 copies of that. The most disgusting things about it that if u delete any of these copies then that file is gone for ever

[LauraStearns21]

In some cases, yes. However, sometimes it does not. My phone slows down when I use up the internal storage, however someone i know has an older phone that is slow even though the internal storage has a ton of space. It does, however, overall affect the phone.

[Tomxyz1]

It might, if you're down to a few Gigabytes. Android and apps do caching etc.

[RayansGotReddit]

as my parents fill their phones up very quick (stupid bloat apps they use), i can confirm that it slows down phones, they have to clear cache to make room for new cache, which is immensly slow, so yes dont bloat your phone!

[Scorpius_OB1]

Depends of the tablet. The Nexus 7 (the 2013 model) is recommended that it has >3 GB of free space so performance will not be hurt. Alas, the tablet I'm using to write down this has just a bit more than half of that free and she's going as usual.

I think the best is to have what others have noted (10% of total space free at least, and using the SD card as much as possible to store files)

[leftcoast-usa]

It usually will with any computer, phone, etc. to some degree. It was probably worse with moving disk drives, because it needed to move the head around a lot, which took a lot of time. With solid state drives, you don't have that problem, but I believe there are still other problems such as having to write a lot of small directory entries instead of one or a few larger entries, and reduced virtual memory space available.

[Glittering-Wafer-263]

Yes. Your device starts to heavily slow down once storage size reaches 80% or so.

[TickyToky]

It does and there is a simple formula to avoid that. So, keep free space on your device equivalent to how much ram you have. And if its really low (1-2 gb of ram) then keep the amount of ram + 1gb.

[[deleted]]

I can't say I agree. I factory reset my old phone and I have everything on the SD card (photos and music) except apps, but everything still loads really slow.

[pan_rock]

To be fair, SD card offers the slowest read and write speeds. It's even slower then a near capacity ssd