More Available Disk Space on SSDs = Higher Performance

There is a lot of discussion on forums about the impact of available disk space on SSD performance. A pertinent question was raised; At what point does drive utilization impact SSD performance? Running some quick tests, the results proved rather insightful.

Test runs on a trimmed drive at 87.3% capacity (93.9% capacity upon completion of each run):

4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.917 s, 196 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.9674 s, 195 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 22.1089 s, 185 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.4842 s, 200 MB/s

Test runs on a trimmed drive at 62.9% capacity (69.4% capacity upon completion of each run):

4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 20.4235 s, 201 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 22.7503 s, 180 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 21.9374 s, 187 MB/s
4096000000 bytes (4.1 GB) copied, 21.1049 s, 194 MB/s