How much can i fill up my iPhone until it starts slowing down?`

[diamondback]

I have an 8 gig iPhone. How much music and videos can I put on it before it starts to slow down?

[jason72780]

Exactly 6.4GB

[diamondback]

Exactly 6.4GB

for real? or are you joking?

[iPaull]

for real? or are you joking?

i think its true

[Jimmy97]

Generally, I think it's that you shouldn't cross 95% of the capacity. That puts it around 6.7 gb if I'm not mistaken, but I'd keep a bit more free to be on the safe side. 6.4 is 90% of the iPhone's capacity, so it's a good amount.

[ShadowMunky]

And with the 16gb, how much can you fill that up ? This may be a little off topic, but i have a top gear episode which i conveted and it takes up 600mb

[ReyZero]

600mb for a 1 hour episode?
I have full movies (120 minutes) that are around 400mb.

I have less then 250mb left on my iPhone and I haven't noticed any slow down, although I could have less then 1 second delays but they're not noticeable.

[Jimmy97]

Some apps just take time to load, no matter your storage. (Settings and Calendar take up to 3 seconds).
Anyway, for the 16GB it's just double. I leave 1GB free on mine, as much as I'd like to fill it up. Phone app opens instantaneously, iPod takes a second at most. SMS should be faster though, takes like 3 seconds.

[Code Monkey]

The flash based memory used by the iPhone is virtually identical to the RAM in your computer in the way it works as far as finding and retrieving information. There is no appreciable difference in seek or access regardless of percent used or even file fragmentation. With electrons moving at the speed of light compared to a physical read head on a hard drive, it's not like there's going to be a difference between fetching a file from one, two, or a thousand different sectors regardless of their numerical order in the flash memory's controller chip (which does not necessarily have anything to do with the memory address' physical location within the chip anyhow).

Flash memory is inherently unstable and the controller is constantly remapping your X.X GB of capacity among a considerably larger pool of total available memory because sectors fail permanently quite often compared hard drive based storage; this is why earlier flash was only rated for a certain number of rewrites. After so many re-writes, too much of the memory would be hosed permanently so now they manufacture them with a large buffer of space and only let you use a certain amount at a time. By randomly remapping the sectors as you rewrite to the flash memory, the number of times any one sector gets used is minimised which helps prevent failures. As sectors still fail and are listed as unusable, this pool of total possible memory shrinks until even current flash memory will fail, but the time to that failure is far outside the lifespan of the iPod/iPhone itself for all intents and purposes. It's this overhead of ensuring the information is written to valid and properly functioning memory addresses that makes flash so slow compared to hard drives even though it could, in theory, be as fast as volatile RAM.

At any rate, while there are some anecdotal reports of iPods functioning less stably when nearly or completely full, there are far more people out there happily running their iPods chock full without incident. There's certainly no technical reason why it should matter how full or empty the flash storage is kept.

[jmyler]

At any rate, while there are some anecdotal reports of iPods functioning less stably when nearly or completely full, there are far more people out there happily running their iPods chock full without incident. There's certainly no technical reason why it should matter how full or empty the flash storage is kept.

Great post! I completely agree with all of that. I'm glad someone said it, if everything is working properly there is no reason you shouldn't be able to run your iPhone full as can be. The system has already allocated the necessary space it needs.

[ReyZero]

I'll be awaiting for my hologram memory. Infinite ftw
There is one huge difference between the memory in your computer (DDR) and flash memory, in that DDR can only hold memory when there's power. :P