Samsung Over Provisioning?

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Is Over Provisioning necessary or worth it on a Windows 10 machine? I read it has something to do with garbage collection but I thought with Windows 10 that doesn't work anymore? I'm not even sure what OP does.

 

[Johnny Lucky]

Here is a link to a Samsung white paper that explains over provisioning:

http://www.samsung.com/global/busin.../SSD/global/html/whitepaper/whitepaper05.html

Here are more links:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=what+is+ssd+over+provisioning

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Here is a link to a Samsung white paper that explains over provisioning:

http://www.samsung.com/global/busin.../SSD/global/html/whitepaper/whitepaper05.html

Here are more links:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=what+is+ssd+over+provisioning

thanks, already read the pdf on it but it didn't answer my question

 

[ctk1981]

Seagate article explaining Over provisioning benefits

Test at anandtech showing results of different OP settings

 

[nanaki333]

since we've long saturated SATA6Gb, manufacturers need to take a page from intel's book with the DC (s3700, s3710 and all below) series so you don't HAVE to over-provision. advertising 1TB but only really 750GB is usable if you want the advertised performance, is ridiculous.

anyway, to answer your question, yes, over-provisioning (at least most consumer drives) is a definite need.

i run primocache on my computers with SSDs so that it absorbs all the random writes in RAM and then makes a single write every hour instead (or whatever i set it to). prolongs the life of your SSDs so you can get the most of that too.


ctk, thanks for linking that. i don't ever remember seeing that article from anandtech. was a good read and nice to actually SEE how things are affected.

 

[Puffnstuff]

You understand that the unallocated memory is the portion of memory set aside for future block failures and when you use overprovisioning you are taking away from this reserve. If you care about the drive controller being able to have reserve blocks to move data to when they begin to fail then leave well enough alone.

 

[Charlie98]

I thought with the newer, typically larger mainstream drives we have nowadays, OP was unnecessary. Maybe when you were trying to rock a 30-60GB SSD... but something like a 512GB?

 

[ctk1981]

Samsung 950 pro drive tested

If you look at the graphs, you can select a drive to show the benefits of 25% OP. Even 512GB drives benefit. Most of the drives that do well to begin with, do better with OP. Always exceptions to the rule but for the most part it seems OP helps smooth things out.

 

[Phynaz]

Not needed for a typical workload. If you are literally doing nonstop torture test writing to a drive then the benchmarks will show a difference.

 

[Cerb]

You understand that the unallocated memory is the portion of memory set aside for future block failures and when you use overprovisioning you are taking away from this reserve. If you care about the drive controller being able to have reserve blocks to move data to when they begin to fail then leave well enough alone.

Not so. Unallocated space is space not used by any partition (nor the little space used by the partition table(s)). The drive’s reserved space is not anything you can touch, without specialized software/hardware (really software, but tying it to hardware makes for good DRM).

 

[Cerb]

Is Over Provisioning necessary or worth it on a Windows 10 machine?

No. It was useful with older drives on XP and Vista. With OSes from the last 5+ years, and SSDs from the last 3+, don't bother, 99.999% of the time.

I read it has something to do with garbage collection but I thought with Windows 10 that doesn't work anymore?

That's just part of an SSD functioning. "Garbage collection" works in any OS.

I'm not even sure what OP does.

It gives the drive more breathing room. TRIM gives comparable benefits (manual over-provisioning could be better for a server than enabling TRIM, but no worries on your desktop or notebook).

When you write, the drive writes to new pages, and maps those pages to the LBAs written to. The old data is still there, right then. It's marked for removal. At some point, the drive will copy all the data from that erase block that is still in use to a fresh one, and erase that one that has the old data on it. Most drives have 5% or more of their flash dedicated to this. The more space it has to work with, the longer it can wait before doing that work, the more options it has to write while also reading, and the result is a faster, more responsive, drive.

But, most non-Sandforce drives from the last few years are plenty fast enough with just idle time (840 Pro being notable exception, for a fast drive), and even a bit better with TRIM, which is natively supported and enabled in Windows 7 and up.

Normally, free space is not pointed to, but the data is still there. The drive has to act like it is full, once you've written over it. TRIM lets the OS tell the drive what blocks are actually free space, so that if you have 50GB free, the SSD can actually go make use of that 50GB, much like if you had manually over-provisioned by close to that much*. So, with a TRIM-enabled system, just leave free space on the SSD, most of the time, and you'll get around the same benefits as adding over-provisioning.

 

[TheIceFireNinja]

Is Over Provisioning necessary or worth it on a Windows 10 machine? I read it has something to do with garbage collection but I thought with Windows 10 that doesn't work anymore? I'm not even sure what OP does.

So this is to explain directly what Samsung told me on the phone for Clarification:

Overprovisioning is just a way to simply prevent you from overfilling your drive to an extent that it bogs down your drives performance. Even NvME drives and such can be bogged down if there's too much data on them, so simply put, 10% OP will just prevent you from utilizing that last 10% available storage on the drive, allowing the system to fully utilize the performance of the drive without it being slowed down by overloading of data.