Beginners • Should I leave some unpartitioned space (for wear levelling) in a flash stick?

I've heard that leaving some unused space in an SD card or flash stick supposedly improves its performance and endurance. Is that true?

From the Alpine Linux wiki at https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspb ... ual_method:

Tip: To reduce SD wear risk, it is advised to keep at least 10% of capacity as unallocated space. If partitioned previously at full capacity, run blkdiscard /dev/mmcblk0 to ensure device sectors are discarded before re-partitioning.

I've also read somewhere that these devices already come with some overprovisioning, which would be partly why they appear a little smaller than their advertised capacity. There's so much conflicting information online, so I thought I should ask here.

The flash sticks I use on my RPi 4B are the cheapest models from Kingston and Sandisk, no larger than 64 GB. I'm already running out of space here, so I need to know whether this is something I should worry about. My RPi is a headless home server.

Statistics: Posted by harpia — Thu Apr 30, 2026 9:43 pm

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