Will filling up my SSD slow it down if I have 10% of it Overprovisioned?

[GamerBlake]

I have a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe and I’ve read that filling up SSDs causes them to slow down but does that happen if 10% of the ssd storage is overprovisioned free space?

 

Does anyone happen to know? 

[Kilrah]

No change, you never get to touch the overprovisionined space, it's just kept as spare for when flash zones get to end of life.

[RejZoR]

Overprovisioning is only for safekeeping of NAND cells when they start dying. In all honesty, home users shouldn't ever need to use overprovisioning because SSD controller automatically rotates data through cells (unless you really grind 100GB of data every day through SSD. Even if you have drive filled up majority of time, that doesn't mean it'll be grinding those few thousand empty NAND cells and the rest just idles. If some cells have data sitting still for months and some data is constantly rewritten, it'll sacrifice one write cycle on every 5th full moon and relocate data to cells that are constantly abused to even wear out and dramatically extending NAND life.

 

Also higher end Samsung drives usually write almost as fats through entire drive where cheap ones usually take a bigger hit.

[GamerBlake]

24 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

No change, you never get to touch the overprovisionined space, it's just kept as spare for when flash zones get to end of life.

Oh really? But I should still use Overprovisioning right?

 

I actually was recommended to do so by Anthony from LTT when I asked him on Twitter.

 

Also how much of my SSD can I fill up without it slowing down? Or at least without it become noticeably slower?

[GamerBlake]

6 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Overprovisioning is only for safekeeping of NAND cells when they start dying. In all honesty, home users shouldn't ever need to use overprovisioning because SSD controller automatically rotates data through cells (unless you really grind 100GB of data every day through SSD. Even if you have drive filled up majority of time, that doesn't mean it'll be grinding those few thousand empty NAND cells and the rest just idles. If some cells have data sitting still for months and some data is constantly rewritten, it'll sacrifice one write cycle on every 5th full moon and relocate data to cells that are constantly abused to even wear out and dramatically extending NAND life.

 

Also higher end Samsung drives usually write almost as fats through entire drive where cheap ones usually take a bigger hit.

But if I shouldn’t use Overprovisioning why did Anthony from LTT tell me it was a good idea when I asked him on Twitter?

 

 

 

Is the 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 NVMe considered a “high end” drive? Or is high end more like the high capacity drives that cost a fortune?

[RejZoR]

That's not accurate info. Overprovisioning is only touched when NAND cells start to actually die. Given how SSD controller keeps shuffling data in a smart way to avoid that, when that actually starts happening, you better replace SSD, because it's on its last leg anyway. Overprovisioning just ensures when it does start happening, you don't start losing data or getting it in stuck state. It then copies data to overprovisioning zone from those cells and marks those that died as unusable and avoids them in the future. Again, when that starts happening, all cells are close to death at that point. Unless SSD controller is not wearing them out somewhat evenly. Which I highly doubt will happen on Samsung drives as they have one of the best SSD controllers on the market.

[GamerBlake]

3 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

That's not accurate info. Overprovisioning is only touched when NAND cells start to actually die. Given how SSD controller keeps shuffling data in a smart way to avoid that, when that actually starts happening, you better replace SSD, because it's on its last leg anyway. Overprovisioning just ensures when it does start happening, you don't start losing data or getting it in stuck state. It then copies data to overprovisioning zone from those cells and marks those that died as unusable and avoids them in the future. Again, when that starts happening, all cells are close to death at that point. Unless SSD controller is not wearing them out somewhat evenly. Which I highly doubt will happen on Samsung drives as they have one of the best SSD controllers on the market.

Hmm well I actually have a Samsung 860 Evo 1TB sata ssd and Samsung 860 QVO 1 TB ssd too (I wanted all of them to be Samsung so I could manage them all in Samsung Magician which I really like) so should I not overprovision them?

 

I already OP’ed the nvme 970 evo plus and it won’t let me UN-Overprovision it only increase the OP size. At least not in Samsung Magician.

[RejZoR]

2 minutes ago, GamerBlake said:

Hmm well I actually have a Samsung 860 Evo 1TB sata ssd and Samsung 860 QVO 1 TB ssd too (I wanted all of them to be Samsung so I could manage them all in Samsung Magician which I really like) so should I not overprovision them?

 

I already OP’ed the nvme 970 evo plus and it won’t let me UN-Overprovision it only increase the OP size. At least not in Samsung Magician.

I'm using Samsung 850 Pro 2TB and I don't use overprovisioning. I do use Samsung Magician so it should start warning me when SMART parameters go over thresholds. When that starts happening I'll just buy new SSD coz it'll probably be that old.

[GamerBlake]

Just now, RejZoR said:

I'm using Samsung 850 Pro 2TB and I don't use overprovisioning. I do use Samsung Magician so it should start warning me when SMART parameters go over thresholds. When that starts happening I'll just buy new SSD coz it'll probably be that old.

Hmm I probably will just not OP the 860 Evo & 860 QVO then.

 

The 1TB 970 Evo Plus was really expensive though so I figure OP is one of those “better safe than sorry” scenarios. $220 for a 1TB drive like the 970 Evo Plus is crazy expensive but I feel like I was paying for premium quality and high performance. Kinda like when I bought my 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB ram for $200 even though there were a lot of 32GB ram sets that were cheaper.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

23 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

...home users shouldn't ever need to use overprovisioning...

Not exactly true. All SSDs come with overprovisioning set by the factory. You should never reduce that amount of overprovisioning and there is rarely, if ever, a need to add to it. Just leave it alone!

[GamerBlake]

1 minute ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Not exactly true. All SSDs come with overprovisioning set by the factory. You should never reduce that amount of overprovisioning and there is rarely, if ever, a need to add to it. Just leave it alone!

But the Samsung Magician software recommended I enable OP with a recommendation of 10% OP space.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Just now, GamerBlake said:

But the Samsung Magician software recommended I enable OP with a recommendation of 10% OP space.

Where did you see that? I never saw it (and I have around 40 Sammy's). Anyway, all SSDs come with overprovisioning already set by the factory. The amount will vary between manufacturers, depending on the chips used, but will be the best amount for each SSD.

 

Overprovisioning is the setting aside of cells for use exclusively by the SSDs controller. You normally cannot see these, even as unallocated (unpartitioned) space. SSDs come with a manufacturer utility program (sometimes on a CD; sometimes as a download) that will allow you to change the amount of overprovisioning but it is pretty much better to just leave the factory setting alone.
 

You (and some others here may be conflating Overprovisioning with Free Space. They are not the same. Free Space is unused space within a partition. Overprovisioning is unformatted space reserved by the SSD strictly for its own use and is normally not seen by the user. The free space that the controller needs for wear leveling, write amplification reduction, and part of the TRIM operations needs to be accessible to each partition. For an SSD with only one partition, you need to leave 20-25% of the partition unused. If you put multiple partitions on an SSD, then each partition needs to have 20-25% of that partition kept as free space.

 

Again, just leave the factory Overprovisioning alone!

 

[RejZoR]

Factory overprovisioning is around 300KB or something tiny like that. Really, when any of the cells comes to THIS point, you have bigger issues...

[Lady Fitzgerald]

10 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Factory overprovisioning is around 300KB or something tiny like that. Really, when any of the cells comes to THIS point, you have bigger issues...

Horsefeathers! It's more like 7-10%. A 512GB drive would have around 35GB overprovisioning. Overprovisioning is used for more than just cell replacement. It is also used for TRIM and garbage collection. 

[RejZoR]

11 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Horsefeathers! It's more like 7-10%. A 512GB drive would have around 35GB overprovisioning. Overprovisioning is used for more than just cell replacement. It is also used for TRIM and garbage collection. 

Not what my SSD says...

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, GamerBlake said:

But if I shouldn’t use Overprovisioning why did Anthony from LTT tell me it was a good idea when I asked him on Twitter?

As he did say overprovisioning will help keep performance as cells get worn down by replacing them, but that's not going to do anything as far as improving performance when the drive is full.

 

SSDs have overprovisioning from the factory tuned to where it's balanced for general use and unless you run hugely write-intensive workloads there's no point in increasing it.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

It's free space, not overprovisioning, that keeps SSDs from losing performance as they fill. Maintain 20-25% free space and you will not have any slowdowns on MLC and TLC SSDs (QLC SSDs are another story due to issues other than lack of free space).