Samsung Magician for Over Provisioning shrink

[highcountryrider]

Hope this doesn't sound dumb (wouldn't be the first time for me!) but when I set up my new 830 256 GB during Win 7 install I left 13.50 GB of 238 GB available as unallocated space and installed the OS. I've installed MB drivers and a couple of monitoring and benchmark utilities and that's it. Now, it appears that the 13.5 GB might not be enough for Over Provisioning on this drive.

I've opened the Samsung Magician software and gone to the Over Provisioning section. It shows the C drive as being 225 GB in size. It shows that OP available is 13.50 GB and the OP recommended as 23.80 GB. Upon Analyze it placed 23.80 GB in the Shrink Size (GB) box. I would think that I should just enter 10 GB there and the total OP available would then be 23.50 GB. Does that sound correct.

Now comes the dumb part. I assume that if I enter that number in the box and click on Shrink it will reduce the C drive by that amount and just add it to the already existing 13.50 GB of Unallocated space. Anyone know if that is the way it works? I guess what I'm not sure of is whether it adds it the already Unallocated space or creates a separate space or partition.

Appreciate any clarification.

EDIT: Thought I would add this. Currently using a High Performance power scheme (recommended for SSDs?) I have disabled both Hibernation and Sleep in the scheme. Is there any positive or negative involved in changing that and allowing the system to Sleep?

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Yes, that is how it works. The magician will reallocate ssd space for overprovisioning

I have two Samsung ssd's and used the Samsung Magician overprovisioning recommendation. No muss! No Fuss! No bother!

Disabling both hibernation and sleep is a tweak that saves some drive space. When you enable hibernation and sleep extra data will be written to the ssd. I have been disabling both features long before consumer ssd's became popular.

 

[inzone]

I have the very same drive and it formatted to the 238gb size just like you as well , however I did not set an overprovisioning space at all an am kind of curious as to why you did. I don't see why an overprovisioning is so important unless you are using the SSD in a server environment where there are a large amounts of reads and writes , for the average everyday user there isn't a big need to overprovision.

 

[highcountryrider]

I have the very same drive and it formatted to the 238gb size just like you as well , however I did not set an overprovisioning space at all an am kind of curious as to why you did. I don't see why an overprovisioning is so important unless you are using the SSD in a server environment where there are a large amounts of reads and writes , for the average everyday user there isn't a big need to overprovision.

This was my first SSD purchase and well, to be honest, I think I got confused! I had read about Over Provisioning as I was deciding which SSD to buy. I also had read that there is always some inherent built in space by the drive manufacturers to accommodate Over Provisioning. So I thought I would add some more during setup to get to Samsung's recommended 7 to 10%.

The whole concept is a bit hard for me to understand and there are obviously two trains of thought about the need for OPing. Yours is that there is no reason to have any and there are many who say it is very necessary to help the efficiency and longevity of a SSD. For a non-technical person such as myself it is very confusing.

I would dearly love to recover the 13 + GB of I had set aside to add to the supposedly built in space but also want to make sure I utilize the SSD drive in the most efficient manner.

I hope this makes sense to you. I wish it did to me.

 

[highcountryrider]

Yes, that is how it works. The magician will reallocate ssd space for overprovisioning

I have two Samsung ssd's and used the Samsung Magician overprovisioning recommendation. No muss! No Fuss! No bother!

Disabling both hibernation and sleep is a tweak that saves some drive space. When you enable hibernation and sleep extra data will be written to the ssd. I have been disabling both features long before consumer ssd's became popular.

Thanks for the reply and clarification. As you can tell from my reply to inzone above, this is a very confusing issue for a first time SSD user such as myself. You obviously believe, as do many others I have read posts from, that OPing is very important to assure the best use of a SSD's functionality and longevity. His opinion, also echoed by many others, is that for the vast majority of users like myself there is no need to be concerned with OPing at all.

As to disabling Hibernation, it was obvious to me from the pre-purchase research that I had done that it was very necessary, both to avoid excess writing to the SSD and to regain the space that Hibernation sets aside. The Sleep issue is what I was most curious about. It appears that there were some early issues with this function causing major problems with some SSDs. But, I have to admit, I've always liked the Sleep feature on my normal HDD based systems. Again, confusing for a SSD noobie to make any sense of.

I guess the root of all my concern is that even though the price of SSDs has dropped dramatically and I did get a great deal on mine ($170 US) it is still only a 256 GB drive. For that money you can get a 3 TB HDD or a couple of 1 TB drives and run in RAID 0 for fast performance. I guess I've been fortunate in that I've never had a mechanical HDD fail on me and some were in use for 4 + years. The jump to the new technology is not very cost effective if I don't know how to set it up and use it to the maximum effectiveness and it dies in a year or two. Just saying.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

In theory overprovisioning provides increased endurance and improves performance. Over-provisioning reserves more NAND for the ssd's controller to perform background maintence. If the controller has enough reserved NAND to handle garbage collection processes during constant activity, then ssd performance will not slow down as much. The end result is improved performance and possibly an increase in the longevity of an ssd. On the negative side overprovisioning reduces available capacity.

We get very few questions about overprovisioning any more. If memory serves, I think AnandTech conducted tests and was able to demonstrate that overprovisioning helps reduce performance degradation. Storage Review addressed it during their review of the Intel 520 at the beginning of this year. The majority of consumers and gamers don't really need to concern themselves with overprovisiong. Overprovisiong is more of a concern over in the enterprise side of the market.

 

[highcountryrider]

Best answer selected by highcountryrider.

 

[dangerismymiddlename]

Hope this doesn't sound dumb (wouldn't be the first time for me!) but when I set up my new 830 256 GB during Win 7 install I left 13.50 GB of 238 GB available as unallocated space and installed the OS. I've installed MB drivers and a couple of monitoring and benchmark utilities and that's it. Now, it appears that the 13.5 GB might not be enough for Over Provisioning on this drive.

I've opened the Samsung Magician software and gone to the Over Provisioning section. It shows the C drive as being 225 GB in size. It shows that OP available is 13.50 GB and the OP recommended as 23.80 GB. Upon Analyze it placed 23.80 GB in the Shrink Size (GB) box. I would think that I should just enter 10 GB there and the total OP available would then be 23.50 GB. Does that sound correct.

Now comes the dumb part. I assume that if I enter that number in the box and click on Shrink it will reduce the C drive by that amount and just add it to the already existing 13.50 GB of Unallocated space. Anyone know if that is the way it works? I guess what I'm not sure of is whether it adds it the already Unallocated space or creates a separate space or partition.

Appreciate any clarification.

EDIT: Thought I would add this. Currently using a High Performance power scheme (recommended for SSDs?) I have disabled both Hibernation and Sleep in the scheme. Is there any positive or negative involved in changing that and allowing the system to Sleep?

Drive manufacturers define a gigabyte as 10^9, or 1,000,000,000 bytes. Almost all software defines a gigabyte as 2^30, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. <-- There's your missing 13 GB.

I believe this is what over provisioning is for: in order to write to an SSD memory location, it must be zeroed. This is slow (relative to a read or write). The drive will use this over provisioned space as temp space so that it can zero memory at it's leisure so-to-speak. It will write to already zeroed over provisioned space, and then move the data to the SSD's partition when it has the time to zero the locations there.

 

[Spogaz]

Hey there,

Looks like you may be able to help me.

I installed Samsung Magician and did the over provisioning on my Evo 840
Then windows crashed. I formatted and reinstalled windows.
I installed Magician on the new install of windows 7.
How every when I go into it now it will flick the screen quickly and say that the disk is already in use.
"Please check that drive is not being used by another process then try again"
I can't format the partition off the drive using any standard program and its a special kinda drive by the looks.

How can I reformat get back all 128gb or 111 is normal the case and start from scratch