[SOLVED] Quick question before I reformat

jbwheels

Commendable
Mar 3, 2017
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1,510
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
 
Solution
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...
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.
 
Solution
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