Over provisioning?

[xnoobftw]

I saw it in the samsung magician software and it says that it recommends taking 10% of the storage space to prolong the SSD's lifespan...

What is this? Should i over provision? I saw that my 250gb ssd only has like 232gb of space so where's the rest? Is it already OPed?

[Jlryan]

SSD's are like Hard Drives in terms of how the available storage is presented, it'll be advertised as 250GB as that is how manufacturers look at it, they see 1GB as 1000 Megabytes instead of 1024 (which it really is). It roughly equals to about a 7% reduction in size, so 250GB - 7% = 232.5GB.

 

Over provisioning just sets aside some space so you don't accidentally go over the recommended amount to keep free, it's basically so your SSD can manage and shift bits of data around while it does garbage collection / TRIM. If you use too much of the space, or completely fill the SSD, you'll end up seeing some performance degradation. 

[Godlygamer23]

Over provisioning normally is a set of flash chips that cannot be accessed by the user. The reason why they exist is because of the fact that when data is removed, only the information from the file table is removed, causing the actual data to remain and become "stale" or invalid. If all flash chips that are accessible by the user are full of invalid data, the controller will start writing to the chips for over provisioning, allowing for full write speeds. You might ask...why can't the SSD just write to the flash chips with invalid data? It can, but in the case of hard drives, they just overwrite data and that's the end of that. SSDs on the other hand - due to the way flash works - need to first remove the data and then write the new data to the cell. This takes two cycles instead of one, causing a slowdown in write speeds. We do have Trim to combat this issue, but over-provisioning is still a good idea.

[xnoobftw]

Over provisioning normally is a set of flash chips that cannot be accessed by the user. The reason why they exist is because of the fact that when data is removed, only the information from the file table is removed, causing the actual data to remain and become "stale" or invalid. If all flash chips that are accessible by the user are full of invalid data, the controller will start writing to the chips for over provisioning, allowing for full write speeds. You might ask...why can't the SSD just write to the flash chips with invalid data? It can, but in the case of hard drives, they just overwrite data and that's the end of that. SSDs on the other hand - due to the way flash works - need to first remove the data and then write the new data to the cell. This takes two cycles instead of one, causing a slowdown in write speeds. We do have Trim to combat this issue, but over-provisioning is still a good idea.

how many percent do you recommend then?

[xnoobftw]

SSD's are like Hard Drives in terms of how the available storage is presented, it'll be advertised as 250GB as that is how manufacturers look at it, they see 1GB as 1000 Megabytes instead of 1024 (which it really is). It roughly equals to about a 7% reduction in size, so 250GB - 7% = 232.5GB.

Over provisioning just sets aside some space so you don't accidentally go over the recommended amount to keep free, it's basically so your SSD can manage and shift bits of data around while it does garbage collection / TRIM. If you use too much of the space, or completely fill the SSD, you'll end up seeing some performance degradation.

how much would you recommend me OPing?