Too late to over-provision?

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jmillertime89

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Feb 10, 2012
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So I was toying around with Samsung's SSD Magician software, checking up on the performance of my now 2.5 year old Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD... turns out over provisioning was never enabled, and now I'm wondering if it is too late. The Magician software itself can't seem to edit the OS partition at all, and the Window 7 disk management utility says it can only free up about 1.5 GB of space. This of course is despite having 30 GB of unused space on the drive. I understand that this is (surely) because ssd's scatter data for their own purposes, but how can I condense the used space in order to shrink the partition and enable over provisioning for drive performance?

Some info:

128 GB (30 GB unused) SSD for OS and some files
1 TB HDD (321 GB unused) for storage

Currently reading at advertised speeds, but writing at about 1/3 to 1/2 advertised speeds even using the Samsung Magician benchmarking software. Seems to make sense if it is having to work too hard to clean up before writing to space.

Any advice? What is the best way to consolidate the data? Is defragging okay? Will it even help? Thanks in advance for any help!
 
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WyomingKnott
My immediate reaction is that it smells like the disk is not being TRIMmed properly. Is the motherboard controller in legacy ATA mode (no TRIM), AHCI mode, or RAID mode?

DO NOT DEFRAG an ssd. Ever. The closest operation, and the one I would suggest for you, is to
1) Get a bootable backup environment. I used Norton Ghost 8 for many, many years until I got my first SSD. I currently use Easeus ToDo backup, but there are many others. The idea is to boot into your backup from a device other than the SSD.
2) Make an image backup of the whole SSD. Image backups include the boot sector and other things that are not files; you can restore them to a blank drive and boot from that drive.
2.5) Triple-check that the backup is complete...
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WyomingKnott

WyomingKnott

Legenda in Aeternum
Aug 29, 2006
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My immediate reaction is that it smells like the disk is not being TRIMmed properly. Is the motherboard controller in legacy ATA mode (no TRIM), AHCI mode, or RAID mode?

DO NOT DEFRAG an ssd. Ever. The closest operation, and the one I would suggest for you, is to
1) Get a bootable backup environment. I used Norton Ghost 8 for many, many years until I got my first SSD. I currently use Easeus ToDo backup, but there are many others. The idea is to boot into your backup from a device other than the SSD.
2) Make an image backup of the whole SSD. Image backups include the boot sector and other things that are not files; you can restore them to a blank drive and boot from that drive.
2.5) Triple-check that the backup is complete, good, and readable.
3) Do a Secure Erase on the SSD. Personally, I use a bootable version of Parted Magic for my Secure Erase operations. This does a "factory reset" on the drive; among other things it marks all of the blocks as free.
4) At this point you can over-provision the SSD if you are so inclined. Keep in mind that it was already over-provisioned to an extent at the factory.
5) Restore the backup to the SSD.
6) Boot from the nice, clean SSD.
 
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