USB 3.0/SATA drive

[Cream Soda]

Yea, I've already read defragging is a nono. Hell, Intel's toolbox even says not to defrag, so wasn't going to listen to that bit and just the answer I was looking for in terms of space really. I have 170 free, so putting a couple of games won't hurt. Gonna keep my music/media/porn/etc. on the HDD, so really won't have any danger of filling this thing up, even with the games, for pretty much as long as I'm using it

[Niya]

The more you keep free the better, but that doesn't mean 50+% free is better than 30%. It just means that you should never completely fill an SSD because part of the speed relies on free flash cells that can be used. 10-20% of free space is normally enough. Most SSDs have a spare area that isn't even visible to you (your 240GB SSD probably has 256GB of flash cells, so ~16GB of spare area) that is used for "replacing" cells that are close to dieing.

[Cream Soda]

Alright, when determining % free, should I go by 240 or the 223 of actual memory i get after formatting or w/e the fuck is taking up all that space?

[Niya]

That difference comes from how manufacturers and windows "count" a gigabyte.
The manufacturers cheat and say 1GByte = 10^6 = 1.000.000 bytes
Windows and any other OS counts correctly and says 1GByte = 2^20 = 1.048.576 bytes
And because of those ~47,4MByte per GByte difference you get that lower value.

Go by the windows value.

[hey]

That's not cheating. A gigabyte IS 1,000,000,000 bytes. The difference comes from using entirely different units. Windows reports sizes in kibi/mebi/gibi/tebi bytes.

And guess what? Windows is the only one in the wrong. It specifically uses KB/MB/GB/TB, when they use KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB. I've never seen a mislabled hard drive. Windows lies about file sizes to avoid having to explain what a mebibyte is.

[Niya]

K, let me rephrase it then...
Manufacturers use the SI prefixes and count on a decimal basis, whereas windows and some other OS/file managers count on a binary basis but show the values with the SI prefixes instead of the Ki/Mi/Gi IEC prefixes that pretty much everyone ignores even though they were already standardized back in 1996. This has led to quite a bit of confusion, and after several lawsuits the manufacturers started to print little "1GB = 1.000.000 Bytes" hints on their boxes.
It may have been more or less logical to count magnetic HDDs on a decimal basis, but since the flash chips of SSDs work on a binary basis it's just nonsense to use the SI values... <.<

[hey]

It may have been more or less logical to count magnetic HDDs on a decimal basis, but since the flash chips of SSDs work on a binary basis it's just nonsense to use the SI values... <.<

Using different units for ssds than hdds would be pretty silly.