Samsung SSD Over Provisioning

[Micas99]

Hello gents,

Could use some advice on disk configuration. There are 4 Samsung SSDs and 1 mechanical drive. Disk 0, 1, 2 are SSDs, using Magician to set a 10% over-provision. Disk 4 is an m.2 970 EVO. Disk 3 is mechanical.

I was having a problem attempting to create a system image. It appeared to be due to the disk4 system reserved partition being only 50mb. I cleared the existing over provision on the the disk and allocated more space to the system reserve to get it to 600mb. Then the system image creation works fine. The question I have is how to get 10% over provision on disk 4? The magician application grays out the over provision setting for some reason. Google provided what looks like a reasonable solution;

Delete recovery partition from Disk 0 (use diskpart for this, Disk Management will not allow it).
Then shrink C: by 10GB and leave it unallocated.

Overprovisioning in Samsung Magician essentially does the same thing. Recovery partition at the end of the drive is preventing it from functioning normally.

If I read that correctly, that would indicate that I should delete the 507 MB partition on disk 4, then shrink C: until I have about 95 GB total unallocated space, then use magician to set the over provision. Is it dangerous to delete the recovery partition? Would it be better for me to simply shrink C: by ~95 GB and leave the recovery partition as is?

Thanks in advance.

 

[B00nie]

Most modern SSDs overprovision by default internally, why do you bother with this? Just keep steady backups.

 

[Micas99]

Well, as I mentioned, I was having a problem being able to create a system image. I've solved that, and I was able to shrink the "C:" partition in order to create a 93 GB over-provision. But if I understand what you said, there's no reason to have an overprovision on any of my SSDs because the SSD does that on it's own, sort of in a hidden way? If that's true, then I can just expand all volumes to their maximum value and call it a day?

Should I delete the recovery partition? It's only 507 MB so I leaving it alone seems sensible. Wouldn't want to suddenly blow up windows.

 

[B00nie]

The SSDs have a bank of unused and 'invisible' memory cells as overprovisioning which get used if a cell is detected faulty and has to be replaced. The overprovisioning option in the magician is just a chance to reserve even more cells for this purpose.

If you delete the recovery partition then you lose the recovery option. I'm not sure if it will cause other problems.

 

[Micas99]

Thanks. Make sense. I'll leave it as-is unless free space becomes an issue.

 

[pinoy]

Basically, any space you are not currently using is used as overprovisioning without you explicitly telling the drive use this much space for overprovisioning. So if you have a 500 GB drive and you are only using 30 GB then the 470 GB will be used for overprovisioning dynamically but you can use that space at any time.