Does Your Phone Really Get Slower When its Storage is Full?

There is a concern that smartphones get slower when the internal storage is getting close to full. To test this theory I used the 1TB version of the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and monitored it's read/write speeds with different amounts of free space available. Here is what I found out!

#garyexplains

[GaryExplains]

Just a quick note, this video isn't about what Android does when it doesn't have enough free storage space to function. Lack of free space is a critical error situation and you can expect Android to not function correctly. This video is about the speed of the internal storage relative to the amount of space used/free. Please don't confuse the two.

[conradpamphil]

How about, speedtest G on similar phone with Full storage and one which is not full?

[scofield]

You have to test below 500 MB.
That's where my S7 Edge slows down and refuses to do some android actions but it goes full berserk under 50 MB where it just turns into the original Samsung Galaxy S in terms of speed and you can't do squat shit without freeing some memory.

[sajeelakhter]

Phone really slows down when the space is less than 1gb or like near or less than 500mb in some phones

[ImperatorLp]

Hey Garry, probs to you! I was relly stunned that you reveal the answer directly and not stretching the video! Keep up the good work!

[rpvaghasiya]

Wow no BS and direct answer with not so forced explanation. 👏👌

[SCtester]

You are truly a savior of YouTube - giving people the info right up for those that don't need the full backstory, rather than trying to keep people around for as long as possible. Thank you, more YouTubers should take inspiration from this!

[amba]

Macbook running windows? what kind of a savage are you?
(jk)

[snugbreezy]

I'm always staying around till the end, Gary. I love your videos!!

[Wei-ymbs]

My s8 was lagging so much when I was at almost full storage. Once I cleared about 20gb of storage It started working faster

[riteshguleria]

Long awaited video...as always you are the best Gary❤️🔥🔥

[willalmur]

I'm glad I stayed for the entire video. The test and explanation is so beautiful, it's almost artistic. Props for a job well done <3

[marauderinchief]

Was i looking for an answer to this puzzling conundrum? You bet. No matter how powerful the SoC, phones always start to lag once apps begin frequently updating storing voluminous cache files and internal storage diminishing. At least it appears like the phone is beginning to stutter.

[glharlor]

Wouldnt the flash memory in the phone fail much quicker due to the small amount of space available for wear leveling?

[ryanvangeems]

You're a champ for answering at the start!
Watching all of it just because you're a legend 🎉

[jazmynegrace]

Thank you so much for explaining this. and honestly because you told us the answer in the middle it made me want to listen to listen longer. It is very frustrating having to wait.🙏🏾❤

[aminemaverick]

I enjoy you videos man. Thanks a bunch

[bhuvankiran]

please do this GARY !
SPEEDTEST G:- KIRIN 970 VS SNAPDRAGON 675 VS 835.

[JolanRensen]

I don't think read/write speeds are the problem. When the phone fills up after being used a lot, like you said writing a big file won't fit in a single block, it needs to fill up smaller gaps first etc. However in the long run Android does try to clean up this and sort of "defragment" the disk, taking away processing power that could be used by other apps. Of course this isn't defragmenting, because that's for hard drives, but it does use fstrim which comes down to the same thing. I found that running my phone with a gigabyte or fewer free memory for a long time would in fact make it overall slower when opening apps, running multiple things and overall it just froze more often. Running Fstrim (with root) manually for a short while improved performance significantly, as I suspect because Android doesn't have to clean up and reorder its storage anymore.
This however did compare to just keeping a few gigabytes of free memory at all time as Android then had to clean up less often.
Again this is just personal experience, I did not run a test myself, but I would be curious to find how your phone operates after a week of having less than a gigabyte of free space.

[PietroSoft]

If you use a cheapo phone the slow down its quite noticeable. But with beasts with 6GB+ RAM and Snap 845 and 855 its not gonna be very noticeable. Try with something with a snap 400 series, and 16GB of internal storage... It becomes a lagfest.