[SOLVED] Quick question before I reformat

[jbwheels]

I've got a problem with my drive configuration. Somehow I'm using my old, plain-jane ssd as my C: drive and my new Optane 900P as an additional drive. There are quite a few utilities I can use to make a disk copy to sort this out. I'm checking out Samsung Magician at this moment. My question: should Optane drives be overprovisioned? I thought I read at some point that they were overprovisioned internally and didn't expose this extra area. Not too sure about that one... Endurance shouldn't be a problem, though -- I think they have the capability to do something like 10 disk writes a day for 5 years (I know I'm off, but close enough for argument's sake I think). There may be other advantages to overprovisioning I haven't covered (performance possibly?).

Please share with me your wisdom and experience Sorry if this question requires more depth than I originally anticipated. Thank you!

jb

 

[Newtonius]

To answer your question it really depends on how much you plan to write on your drive on a daily basis. For example if you're getting a 500GB or smaller and write a lot to it you will benefit from over-provisioning since it will allocate some space to write data on it temporarily to save write cycles to available viewable drive space. This also provides a small boost in performance but not as fast as RAM Caching/Cache-momentum.

But if you're getting a high-storage capacity drive and not writing to it often then you will not benefit much from over-provisioning, though that doesn't mean it's not recommended. It's a personal choice in the end. Data centers used to use provisioning for obvious reasons. Nowadays they just chuck in more drives.

 

[jbwheels]

I've got a 480GB Optane replacing a 512GB 950 Pro as system drive (I suppose I'll repurpose the 950 Pro for data and 2nd-tier apps). Secondary storage is an odd collection of drives -- I may yet build an array or two. But the Optane -- it'll run Windows and most of my apps, I suppose, and store whatever a 480GB would store. Without having to worry about drive wear, I'm inclined to leave 10% unallocated, or maybe 5%. I'm just guessing. I'm looking for some guidance. Thank you.

jb