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Does LR Classic slow down with almost full SSD drives?

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tsinsf

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Operating System:10.13.1
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Mac Pro 2013

I've read that with old fashioned "platter" style hard drives, as the disk fills LR will slow down. Does this also apply to SSD drives?
 
The problem is not the drive type. Or the version of LR The problem is what does your OS do when there is no more free space for Working storage and the OS Swapfile. For this reason I recommend keeping ~100GB of free space on your primary disk drive at all times. LR makes significant use of temporary and intermediate files. These are stored in the /Temp folder which is located in that free space on your primary disc drive not taken up by permanent program and data files.
 
That is one good reason to store your files on an external drive.
 
There is also a fragmentation issue as a drive gets really full; a program (any program) might need to allocate 200 megabytes, and find it can only get that with 100 different pieces averaging 2 MB each. This can slow up file allocation, and (mostly on spinning disks) can slow down read times because the head has to move all over the platter for those pieces. In that sense (this head movement) is not an issue on SSD as there's no rotational or head movement latency. On SSD's, there's also an issue with TRIM (an optimization technique) and related cleanup that works more poorly when very full (depends a bit on OS and drivers and whether it hides allocation for this from you).

So the short version is that even if Cletus' issues do not apply (and they are critical), having a disk really full is not recommended with SSD or spinning disks. Maintaining no more than 80-90% full is a good general plan, but on smaller drives maybe quite a bit more as temp/scratch usage might be larger than that.

PS. Despite my fragmentation comment, do not be tempted to defragment SSD drives, it's generally not a good idea (Wear and tear is more significant than fragmentation penalty).
 
There is also a fragmentation issue
Fragmentation is not really an issue on a Mac. (And not the problem that it once was with a modern version of Windows) Take a look at Hot File Adaptive Clustering as it is used with Mac drives.
 
Fragmentation is not really an issue on a Mac. (And not the problem that it once was with a modern version of Windows) Take a look at Hot File Adaptive Clustering as it is used with Mac drives.
Unless they changed it, it is only for active files not inferquent, and only on the boot volume?

Unless they changed that, it is only on boot volumes, and also only affects frequently used files (over some time). Short term files, like previews, temp files, etc. that are likely to occur in photograph use -- will it really help there? Or are they likely to be fragmented?

I stand by the recommendation, though -- a too-full disk has a lot of potential issues and is a bad idea, SSD or spinning, Mac or PC or other. The one case I've seen where it is not much of an issue are very large database files that are pre-allocated and stable themselves, leaving empty space that's never used in that case seems pointless. Or I guess read-only archives. But neither are a typical user situation.
 
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