Question Over-provisioning on non-Samsung/Crucial SSDs?

[ExTxL]

Is it possible to over-provision an SSD without using Samsung Magician or Crucial Storage Executive (which AFAIK only work on Samsung and Crucial SSDs, respectively)? The only source I've been able to find is this guide (more of an advertisement) from MiniTool, which suggests:

You just need to use the Shrink Volume/Partition feature of Disk Management or MiniTool Partition Wizard to make 15 to 20% of the entire SSD space unallocated. The unallocated space will be automatically assigned by the SSD firmware for overprovisioning.

The bolded portion seems like a suspiciously broad claim. To my understanding, over-provisioning is more than just the existence of an unpartitioned section of the drive; the drive firmware needs to actively utilize it in the correct way. It's possible that all modern SSD manufacturers do program their firmware to do this - I just have no idea if it's actually true. Can anyone with more knowledge share their insight?

 

[USAFRet]

OP is NOT required.

All it does is reduce the visible capacity, so that you, the user, don't fill it up too much.

Just leaving some free space on it does the same thing.

 

[ExTxL]

OP is NOT required.

All it does is reduce the visible capacity, so that you, the user, don't fill it up too much.

Just leaving some free space on it does the same thing.

It's so funny, actually! I was literally just typing up an edit to amend my original post...

The purpose of this question carries the assumption that the user wants to over-provision their SSD, e.g. because they perform a lot of read/writes and often operate at close-to-maximum capacity. Advice that outright dismisses the utility of over-provisioning as a whole is not constructive.

 

[USAFRet]

It's so funny, actually! I was literally just typing up an edit to amend my original post...

The purpose of this question carries the assumption that the user wants to over-provision their SSD, e.g. because they perform a lot of read/writes and often operate at close-to-maximum capacity. Advice that outright dismisses the utility of over-provisioning as a whole is not constructive.

Where and how the data is actually stored among the chips is opaque to the user and software.
The drive firmware shuffles that data around as it sees fit.

Overprovisioning does not wall off a specific space.

You can shrink the original partition, and leave part of it free.
Then, what you see in the OS can be used up to 100%. That 'free spae' will still be there.

 

[ExTxL]

For future readers, it appears that the answer to this part of the original question can be summarized as "Yes."

the drive firmware needs to actively utilize it in the correct way. It's possible that all modern SSD manufacturers do program their firmware to do this - I just have no idea

 

[Misgar]

This article might be of interest.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/overprovisioning-SSD-overprovisioning

It implies there are three potential types of overprovisioning:
1). Inherent
2). Vendor-configured
3). User-configured

So it's possible some form of overprovisioning might already be built into your drive.

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