Can I safely set it to 100% in Space Acres (or the exact amount of free space on the command line)? Or is there some other recommended amount?
I couldn’t find any recommendations in the subspace farmer docs or on the forums. (Just instructions for formatting the whole drive to enable large fs clusters.)
General advice online says to only use 70-80% of a SSD to avoid SSD cell write exhaustion. But farming is very different to general SSD use, so can we use the whole drive?
I tried with 100% and it seems to work, but I got some weird errors when it tried to allocate too much space. (Most Linux tools round up the free space, so I put in 7.3Ti, but the drive only had 7.275Ti). Calculating terabytes using gigabytes / 1024 worked though.
You can even use 100% if the disk is only used for farming. The nice thing is that farmer pre-allocates 100% of necessary space on disk during startup and doesn’t use even a byte more than that, so it can’t crash at runtime due to lack of disk space.
The disk should usually have no issues even with 100% due to internal overprovisioning, though you can set it lower if you want.
There isn’t really a bad value, which is possibly why it is not really described anywhere.
Plotting fills the disk once and only replots it a few more times throughout the lifetime of the protocol.
So by not using 100% of the space you’re simply leaving rewards on the table without really gaining much in return, so it is up to you to decide.
Either way it is quite unlikely that you’ll run out of spare cells on an SSD of a reasonable quality.
The worst, the cheapest SSDs I could find have used 43/44/44/45% of their write percentage (4 drives) according to SMART (not sure if I believe it, but that is what they say).
It has been used for several years on Gemini testnets and not mainnet.
All other drives (still really, really cheap, but apparently not as crappy) used during the same period of time are at 0% of write percentage used to this day.
My system drives are used way faster, for example system drive on workstation is at 9% already (4T Samsung 990 Pro that I only use ~1T of).
I used drives at 95-99.5% space utilization (leaving less than 1 sector worth of free space initially). Reducing the amount of space used didn’t seem to help those crappy drives, but they almost certainly earned more than they cost by now anyway.
BTW these are exactly the kind of questions you should be asking in public on Discord or the official forum, rather than in private here.