I just put an SM951 256gb NVME drive on my X99 board to replace a Sandisk Ultra 2 240gb SATA drive. According to Anandtech the Sandisk already left a bit spare for over provisioning.
Should I over provisioning the SM951 ? I hear Magician doesn't work with this drive so I can't use that.
Thanks
To over provision, just leave a bit of unallocated space (Around 7% or so). I would use GParted to partition your drive, you can burn a live CD (Link to .iso files). It's pretty straight forward from there, just make sure to format your windows partitions as NTFS, and then your Linux partitions as ext4 or whatever you use.
Thanks , will do.
Wait.. overprovisioning is a thing? Were not talking about the spare cells that take over from worn cells?
Wait.. overprovisioning is a thing? Were not talking about the spare cells that take over from worn cells?
From what I've read it is. However, I have read conflicting articles, some say that the SSD does it itself via a garbage collector, and some say just allocating free space works "I wrote to Samsung on 2 separate occasions and in both they confirmed that overprovisioning is just unallocated space at the end of the drive.". I think that the unallocated space theory makes more sense, if a drive is having issues with worn cells it will take over the unallocated and unused cells.
Well theres such a thing as un-usable cells kept back for replacing worn out cells. Overprovisioning seems different, looking it up it requires specific steps to enable on Linux (formatting wise, you need to tell the SSD controller what is left for provisionsing it seems.
But im not sure.
I'm not sure either, I mean what I've seen supports that the SSD is intellegent enough (or rather the controller) to use free unallocated space for the dead SSD cells to extend drive life. If you DO need to flag something as for provisioning my best guess would be that it would be flagging it as a locked "system reserved" partition but I don't think that really makes that much sense.
I'm not 100% either though, I'm just a enthusiast trying to make sense of the info I've read :P
From what ive read overprovisioning allows the SSD to write better to the drive, able to delete and store data faster. extending the drive live uses the unregistered cells, otherwise your SSD would start to report having less capacity.
Samsung magician should sort it for you, it's not bad as far as manufacturer software goes. It'll tell you how much space to allocate for over provisioning then just format the drive with that much space unallocated
Samsung Magician does not support the SM951 drive(s). It will run but it refers to the drive as being 'from another manufacturer' and offers no tools or features like it did for my old 840 Evo.
I cloned the Sandisk and as the San is a 240 I ended up with 14 and a but GB left unallocated on the SM951 so I guess that will do for some ghetto over provisioning.
Thanks
That sucks, i wonder if it's not compatible with NVMe. Hope it works out for you.