How much overprovisioning do you guys set for your SSD? Is it even necessary?

[Supersonicwolfe]

I read somewhere that the recommended over provisioning (OP) is 10%-20%, but some drives like Samsung's already have hardware OP already in the drive that is not visiable in system, matter of fact, most does (most vender don't sell 512 GB, but sell instead sell 500 GB, the 12GB would be Hardware OP. Not to mention NAND die itself usually have a little bit extra, not just 256/512/1024 MB/GB etc).

 

So do you still manually set OP? Through toolbox software like Samsung Magician? Or just shrink the disk volume if the toolbox don't have that function?

 

Here are my own set up:

 

WD_Black SN850X 1TB NVMe

WD Toolbox no op setting

931.39 GiB in Windows, set 30.72GB unallocated for OP, the rest are 900GB OS partition and EFI/Recovery parititon

 

ADATA XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro 256 GB NVMe

ADATA Toolbox no op setting.

238.47GiB in Windows, set 38.01GB as OP, the rest is 200GB Data partition.

*I set plenty of OP for this drive since the capacity is the same as typical NAND capacity.

**I had since changed to set the Volume size to 230GiB because I only put Games on it, using ~220GB

 

Samsung 850EVO 500GB SATA

Samsung Magician OP set to 11%/51GB

465.75 GiB in Windows, Disk Management shown 51.23GB Unallocated.

**The OP is reduced to ~3% making 480GiB available. I have Rapid Mode on and only have software/games on it.

[Hinjima]

Just now, Supersonicwolfe said:

I read somewhere that the recommended over provisioning (OP) is 10%-20%, but some drives like Samsung's already have hardware OP already in the drive that is not visiable in system, matter of fact, most does (most vender don't sell 512 GB, but sell instead sell 500 GB, the 12GB would be Hardware OP. Not to mention NAND die itself usually have a little bit extra, not just 256/512/1024 MB/GB etc).

 

So do you still manually set OP? Through toolbox software like Samsung Magician? Or just shrink the disk volume if the toolbox don't have that function?

 

Here are my own set up:

 

WD_Black SN850X 1TB NVMe

WD Toolbox no op setting

931.39 GiB in Windows, set 30.72GB unallocated for OP, the rest are 900GB OS partition and EFI/Recovery parititon

 

ADATA XPG GAMMIX S11 Pro 256 GB NVMe

ADATA Toolbox no op setting.

238.47GiB in Windows, set 38.01GB as OP, the rest is 200GB Data partition.

*I set plenty of OP for this drive since the capacity is the same as typical NAND capacity, not something like 230GB or 214.2 GiB

 

Samsung 850EVO 500GB SATA

Samsung Magician OP set to 11%/51GB

465.75 GiB in Windows, Disk Management shown 51.23GB Unallocated.

Everything should work out of the box. I would guess that 99% of SSD / m.2 users do not do anything like this.

[ewitte]

Sometimes I'll set a manual OP but I like to see bigger numbers so generally I'll just not fill the drive up.  My 7.68TB PM9A3 actually has 8TB of chips with 320GB not even available.

[Supersonicwolfe]

2 minutes ago, Hinjima said:

Everything should work out of the box. I would guess that 99% of SSD / m.2 users do not do anything like this.

I primary only did it to make my disk appear have a nice rounded number. instead of something like 930.72GB

 

BUT no idea why Disk Management showing me nice 900GB, but explorer is showing 899GB...

[Dedayog]

Agreed with above.  I do not do this at all.

 

I buy shit, it works.  Done.

 

I'll tweak my CPU and GPU, but a lot of folks go looking for gains and issues where there simply aren't any.

 

 

[ewitte]

4 minutes ago, Hinjima said:

Everything should work out of the box. I would guess that 99% of SSD / m.2 users do not do anything like this.

A lot of drives have dynamic SLC cache.  If you fill up close to 100% performance will tank especially with QLC chips.

[Supersonicwolfe]

2 minutes ago, ewitte said:

Sometimes I'll set a manual OP but I like to see bigger numbers so generally I'll just not fill the drive up.  My 7.68TB PM9A3 actually has 8TB of chips with 320GB not even available.

Interesting, that 320GB is probably hardware OP... but math doesn't seems add up. 8TB would be only 7.28GiB...?

[Hinjima]

1 minute ago, Supersonicwolfe said:

I primary only did it to make my disk appear have a nice rounded number. instead of something like 930.72GB

 

BUT no idea why Disk Management showing me nice 900GB, but explorer is showing 899GB...

That is more of an OCD problem than an SSD problem

[ewitte]

10 minutes ago, Supersonicwolfe said:

Interesting, that 320GB is probably hardware OP... but math doesn't seems add up. 8TB would be only 7.28GiB...?

Windows shows 6.99TB off base 2 vs base 10 that the drive manufacturer used.

[Supersonicwolfe]

1 minute ago, billbill said:

Windows reserves space on any type of drive. That's why the numbers can be odd 

It's not just that, it's more have to do binary (base 2) vs base 10

So 1TB should be 1,000,000,000,000B to us humans, but to a machine it would be 1024⁴  = 1,099,511,627,776 iB

So 1TB / 1024 /1024 /1024 /1024 = 931.3 GiB, quite close to 931.39 GiB detected by Windows

 

[ewitte]

7 minutes ago, Supersonicwolfe said:

It's not just that, it's more have to do binary (base 2) vs base 10

So 1TB should be 1,000,000,000,000B to us humans, but to a machine it would be 1024⁴  = 1,099,511,627,776 iB

So 1TB / 1024 /1024 /1024 /1024 = 931.3 GiB, quite close to 931.39 GiB detected by Windows

 

When computers came out 1GB is what we call 1GiB now they changed the naming because it confused everyone when the HDD manufacturers started playing with the numbers. This is relatively new I don't remember ever seeing this used before the last two years or so.  I'm still using GB for GiB unless it is a drive rating because that is what all the software recognizes and always has.

[kokosnh]

4 hours ago, billbill said:

Windows will display available space after it has reserved space for itself.  

Windows will display GiB as GB 

[Supersonicwolfe]

On 2/18/2023 at 12:17 AM, billbill said:

And Windows will always reserve space on the drive 

Yes but only a few kb at most a few MB due to file system and system volume information.

 

Meanwhile the difference between base 10 (GB) and base 2 (GiB) is way better. This is the Main reason why a drive sold as "8TB" only have maximum around 7.5 TiB data usable...

And to computers the file size are in TiB/GiB/MiB... 

 

1 GB is 1,000,000,000

While 1 GiB is 1,073,741,824

That is 7.4% gone just like that 

[NobleGamer]

I set OP to 20%, and Samsung Magician works fine for that, but really any app that can resize partitioned space to unallocated space can take care of that.

 

Manual OP is not necessary, but I do it because:

• There is a potential benefit to the lifespan of the SSD and maybe even a random read/write throughput boost
• I happen to only use ~50% of my SSDs space
• I have no evidence that OP can hurt drive performance or endurance
• So extra OP can help my SSDs at best or do nothing at worst

How much of a benefit there is depends greatly on how much and how often writes happen compared to reads.

 

For more info: 

• https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/overprovisioning
• https://www.atpinc.com/blog/over-provisioning-ssd-benefits-endurance-and-performance

[Supersonicwolfe]

5 hours ago, NobleGamer said:

I set OP to 20%, and Samsung Magician works fine for that, but really any app that can resize partitioned space to unallocated space can take care of that.

 

Manual OP is not necessary, but I do it because:

• There is a potential benefit to the lifespan of the SSD and maybe even a random read/write throughput boost
• I happen to only use ~50% of my SSDs space
• I have no evidence that OP can hurt drive performance or endurance
• So extra OP can help my SSDs at best or do nothing at worst

How much of a benefit there is depends greatly on how much and how often writes happen compared to reads.

 

For more info: 

• https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/overprovisioning
• https://www.atpinc.com/blog/over-provisioning-ssd-benefits-endurance-and-performance

I'm mostly curious on how others did it. As for me I set some manual OP so that I will always have some additional OP even if I almost filled the drives completely.

(On "This Computer" Windows those colored bar to show how much space is left, by default it turns red when past 90%)

[MicHaeL MonStaR]

I'd surely hope it is done automatically, because I've filled my SSDs to the brim. XD

 

That said, I do try to stick to that unofficial rule of keeping 15-20% of the total available space free, because I definitely notice that the closer to "full" it gets the more it struggles. - Even though it might be a fast SSD, a SATA-drive or even an NVMe-drive, these things just do not like being almost full.

 

So while I don't do anything technical to set aside space, I try to just watch the meter and manage it, even though my discipline for it kinda sucks. - This is why I've decided to just buy as much storage as I want to spend money on, because I hate being low on space, both for having it available and the performance/wear. - Basically, just have more than you use or need, otherwise, use less or buy more.

[ewitte]

On 2/17/2023 at 5:00 PM, kokosnh said:

Windows will display GiB as GB 

"Back in my day" it was ALL GB.  GB started out as what you refer to as GiB eventually it seems taking it over completely.  This is USB levels of name changes...

[Supersonicwolfe]

On 2/20/2023 at 6:33 AM, MicHaeL MonStaR said:

I'd surely hope it is done automatically, because I've filled my SSDs to the brim. XD

 

That said, I do try to stick to that unofficial rule of keeping 15-20% of the total available space free, because I definitely notice that the closer to "full" it gets the more it struggles. - Even though it might be a fast SSD, a SATA-drive or even an NVMe-drive, these things just do not like being almost full.

 

So while I don't do anything technical to set aside space, I try to just watch the meter and manage it, even though my discipline for it kinda sucks. - This is why I've decided to just buy as much storage as I want to spend money on, because I hate being low on space, both for having it available and the performance/wear. - Basically, just have more than you use or need, otherwise, use less or buy more.

The Window's drive's capacity bar is pretty ok. It turns red because even if its a traditional hard drive, the lack of capacity will slow the system down due to limited page file size. I think it turns red when there is less than 10-15% of free space left.

[MicHaeL MonStaR]

On 2/22/2023 at 3:15 PM, Supersonicwolfe said:

The Window's drive's capacity bar is pretty ok. It turns red because even if its a traditional hard drive, the lack of capacity will slow the system down due to limited page file size. I think it turns red when there is less than 10-15% of free space left.

Right. I exactly try to keep it out of the red as a kind of rule-of-thumb, cause it should be fine at that point.