Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
geekl33tgamer wrote:Yes - Use Windows built in disk utility (Under Administrative Tools) to shrink the volume of the SSD by say 15-20% and leave the rest un-allocated. You don't need to do anything else like trim it or re-format it. Outside of read-heavy workloads (where you get slightly higher IOPS with overprovisioning), the performance gain is negligible though on most drives and not worth the loss in space?
(Edited for a typo)
Chrispy_ wrote:The samsung magician software recognises a drive as overprovisioned as long as there's some unallocated space. If it's unallocated, the drive uses it however the hell it wants, I guess - so no need to TRIM or GC as far as I'm aware.
just brew it! wrote:Chrispy_ wrote:The samsung magician software recognises a drive as overprovisioned as long as there's some unallocated space. If it's unallocated, the drive uses it however the hell it wants, I guess - so no need to TRIM or GC as far as I'm aware.
I'm sure that's true of new drives. But if the drive has previously been partitioned to use all of the space (as in this case), it is unclear what the best way is to ensure that the freed space is considered unallocated going forward. Unless the partitioning tool issues trim commands, there is another step required.
rado992 wrote:Is this really the case or is the TRIMming not as ideal in real-world conditions?
Captain Ned wrote:rado992 wrote:Is this really the case or is the TRIMming not as ideal in real-world conditions?
The idea here is to hide a chunk of space from the OS so that the controller on the drive can do what it needs to do without the OS poking its head in and making things go all pear-shaped.
Flying Fox wrote:So there seems to be quite a bit of information on how Samsung and its Magician software behaves (what if I don't install the software?). How do Intel drives behave then, any documentation? Just leave space unpartitioned? Or just free space in an allocated partition would do?
Chrispy_ wrote:The reason I mentioned Samsung's Magician software is because (on Samsung drives, at least) it proves that you can just free up previously used space by resizing the partition and providing "unallocated space" and the manufacturer calls that "overprovisioning"
I infer that to mean "unallocated space = overprovisioned" and it doesn't matter whether the pages are dirty or clean because the SSD controller can do anything it wants with unallocated space.
Given that all SSD controllers work on the process of internal defragmentation routines to create empty pages, I would assume that unallocated space is all they need when improving these routines and therefore "overprovisioning" just means giving the controller more spare area to work with than it already has by not filling all the usuable capacity with a partition and volume.