Samsung SSD magician over provisioning

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bgrego

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The Samsung Magician software includes a portion for over provisioning. It has a recommended setting which appears to be about 10%. My question is that it shows OP available as 0. I thought part of the SSD was already setup with a portion allocated for OP. So I am wondering if following its suggestion and letting it set up that recommended amount would actually improve performance or just basically shrink my drives volume. It is the Samsung 830 256 GB version.

Thanks in advance !
 
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"The Samsung Magician software includes a portion for over provisioning." do you mean partition?
What i would say is reinstall the OS onto it and wipe everything, any software than comes on anything is usualy useless as you can find much better versions of what they have open source. It does sound like its just wasting space, as Windows creates whats called WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) so you can reinstall/fix windows with out loosing data (like documents or music or save games).
To help what is over provisioning? look it up it probably wont speed your SSD up.
 
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I can't tell if you are actually asking this question or are using that old instructor technique of asking a question to get me to research myself.
 
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Exactly as i was thinking. 'Why mess with this, the drive will bet set up with the optimum volume'. But when I actually just looked at that function it displayed that my OP volume was 0. And had a recommended setting equal to 10%. That got me wondering it the OP came factory set, or updating (or whatever) changed it to 0 (or it was not factory set like I thought). Google was no help in this matter. So I turned to here.
 
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Hmmm. I guess leaving it at 0 is a legit option. Thanks, I have something to research and think on.
 
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I've got the Samsung 470 SATA 2 3Gb/s 256GB ssd in my personal rig. Although the capacity is advertised as 256GB, the actual capacity is 238GB due to overprovisioning. Your 830 should also have a lower actual capacity but not necessarily the same as mine. The capacity used for overprovisioning varies for different brands and different models.
 
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The instructions for the Samsung 830 says that they recommend that you set aside a OP equal to 7 to 10% of the SSD. It says reliability and read/write management is improved by this feature. Seems funny for Samsung to recommend it if it is already built into the system. I know my 256GB had 238GB usable which is about 7% once I got it set up from scratch. I know my old HHD would also take up some space once it was installed - so that for HHD and SSD I never got 100% of it to use.

In fact, here is what Samsung says in the documentation for their Samsung Magician SSD software:

The Over Provisioning menu provides options for resizing partitions on the disk. The SSD will perform better and last longer if it has free space available to use as swap space, and this utility will help you set aside such space by resizing the partitions on your drive. Swap space is used to perform routine SSD maintenance (TRIM and Garbage Collection) in the background during idle time, allowing the SSD Controller to prepare free blocks for the OS to use in the future. Because the SSD performs best when writing to free blocks, the result is a better user experience through reduced wait time. END

Their software said I had 0 set aside for OP when I ran it as well. A google search for SSD over provisioning clearly explains the benefits of this feature. Samsung says it contributes to a longer life SSD.

Since I have the space available, I just shrunk my C drive using Windows Disk Manager (under services) to create unallocated space, which is what OP uses. If the time comes when I need the space back, I will reclaim it. Since I am not interested in calling Samsung to find out - I am happy with this approach.
 
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Actually that difference between 256GB and 238GB has nothing to do with overprovisioning, it is due to the way drive makers advertise size and how Windows reports size.

To a drive maker, 1GB = 1,000,000,000 (1,000^3)

To Windows 1GiB= 1,073,741,824 (1,024^3)

You can use a ratio of 93% to convert: 93% of 256GB = 238GiB

So, if Windows is reporting "238GB" (technically 238GiB), then you have no overprovisioning.


 
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That is what I thought. Doing more google searches, it seems Samsung has left it up to the user to do any over provisioning, whereas some other makers account for this in other ways. So bottom line, it appears that the user, if he/she has the space using a Samsung 830, should set aside 7-10% for OP.
 
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Wow there are a ton of people piping in on this who have no idea what they are talking about. It is a very good idea to over provision. Yes all drives come with some factory over provision but it is the minimum amount. The more you have the better it is. You can always go back in later and allocate some of the space you left unallocated if you need more room. It is much more difficult to unallocate space once you have been using it. Everything the Samsung site software said is true. It gives a larger pool for garbage collection to work with while idle. It also gives more free blocks to shift around for even wear leveling. It also helps speed up your drive...well keep your drive at maximum speed anyway. If you are only using the drive to transfer a few gigs worth of data a day then you dont need much op as you wouldn't have used up your pool but lets say you leave a pool of 30Gb unallocated but end up transferring 40Gb within a short period of time (a few hours) then you will be waiting on your hard drive to clean up and prepare 10Gb for you to use because it wasn't in your pool ready to go. This slows down the drive and causes it to reuse the blocks it just got. The usually op recomended amount is about 15-20% for a normal user and 20-30% for a power user or if you are using it as a gaming drive. I recommend giving it 30% to begin with and see how much you use in an average day over a month or so time. You can scale back according to your results.
 
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My Samsung 830 512GB is partitioned with 0.1 GB IFS, 95.29 GB (C:), and 381.55 GB (D:).

I just used the Over Provisioning tool in the Magician software to set the recommend OP amount of 47.60 GB. This created 47.60 GB of "Unallocated" space at the end of the drive (after the D:) partition.

My question is, does having a partitioned SSD make a difference where the OP Unallocated space is kept? In other words, is creating the OP Unallocated space after the D: partition any different to creating it after the C: partition, and will it still benefit the C: partition even though it's after the D: partition?

Many thanks.
 
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ARGH: This was NOT due to overprovisioning!!!

The difference between what the manufacturer reported, in your case 256GB and what the OS reports 238GB is ONLY due to the difference between how a manufacturer reports the size using 10^9 as a GB versus how the OS reports a GB using binary 2^30.

SO the manufacturer states 256GB which is 256 * 10^9 or 256 * 1,000,000,000 = 256,000,000,000 Bytes
Since the OS is using 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 the size the OS reports will be 256,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 238.42GB

This will be the same on ANY hard drive SSD or not and will be the same ratio on ACT hard drive regardless of size.
This has been true since hard-drives have been put in to computers!!!

If the SSD magician HAD created space on the drive you would have less than the 238GB as reported by the OS and you would see it as unallocated space in the Windows Disk Management Window.
 
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According to Samsung their solid state drives are shipped with 7% reserved, the same as the GB to GiB conversion. The Samsung Magician allows you to configure the spare area reserved for background functions.

Pretty well documented in several published articles and technical reviews.

I'll have more info in a couple of hours.

 
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I apologize for the delay in responding. I got side tracked quite a bit. Had to do a lot of research too and get confirmation for the following information.

I have confirmed that Samsung does in fact ship their ssd's with 7% capacity reserved for overprovisioning which is hidden from view, even in the Samsung SSD Magician.

When the Samsung SSD Magician shows 0% provisioning that actually means the standard factory 7% overprovisioning has not been expanded or contracted by the user. It is simply in the 7% default mode.

At the same time we also have a fairly new concept called 0% provisioning which first appeared in published articles about this time last year. Like the Samsung Magician 0% overprovisioning, the new concept should not be taken literally or at face value. These are situations where 0 does not mean 0.

The concept of 0% provisioning turned out to be very confusing for a lot of individuals. If I understood the information correctly the SSD manufacturers are using the standard unformatted to formatted ratio from hard disk drives to come up with a difference of 7.37%. That 7.37% is used for overprovisioning and a few other ssd features. As near as I can tell this is what Samsung, Intel, OCZ and other ssd companies are probably doing with their newest ssd's.



 
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Hi All,

Can someone, please, reply to BuildBuildBuild's question above, I have the same situation and no idea whether it matters that I first partitioned my drives and then done the OP.

While, I'm here, anyone experienced anything like this before:
1: performance optimization doesn't run for me at all - which is very scary. First it can hardly find my Samsung 256gb 830 SSD then when it finds it, it doesn't want to run, saying it couldn't make connection to it, the only way I can do it is to hit the "Check All" button, then start but then straight away get an error message saying it couldn't run. Anyone had an issue like this before? Any idea why this could be? I'm running Win 7 by the way. I tried google but couldn't find anyone with the same problem, which is again very scary :S.

2: does it matter if my partition of C: is in 4k format but my second partition I formatted in 64k clusters? Does this matter or shall I re-install win7 and do 64k for C: as well?

Many Thanks,
SamsungOwner
 
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Hi All,

Can someone, please, reply to BuildBuildBuild's question above, I have the same situation and no idea whether it matters that I first partitioned my drives and then done the OP.

While, I'm here, anyone experienced anything like this before:
1: performance optimization doesn't run for me at all - which is very scary. First it can hardly find my Samsung 256gb 830 SSD then when it finds it, it doesn't want to run, saying it couldn't make connection to it, the only way I can do it is to hit the "Check All" button, then start but then straight away get an error message saying it couldn't run. Anyone had an issue like this before? Any idea why this could be? I'm running Win 7 by the way. I tried google but couldn't find anyone with the same problem, which is again very scary :S.

2: does it matter if my partition of C: is in 4k format but my second partition I formatted in 64k clusters? Does this matter or shall I re-install win7 and do 64k for C: as well?

Many Thanks,
SamsungOwner
 
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SamsungOwner

Straight from page 18 of the Magician User Manual:

Caution: Magician supports NTFS and raw (unformatted, unallocated) partitions only.

Last Friday Tom's Hardware published an article recommending sticking with Microsoft Windows NFTS if you are using your ssd as an internal drive and using Microsoft Windows as the operating system. A Samsung 830 series ssd is one of the ssd's that was used for the analysis. Here is a link to the article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-file-system-ntfs,3166.html

I'll do a little research about BuildBuildBuild's question.
 
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BuildBuildBuild & SamsungOwner -

I have an answer. Over Provisioning is for the entire solid state drive. It is not for individual partitions. If you already partitioned the ssd, then the Samsung Magician will give you a choice of which partition to expand or contract. For example if you have a C: and a D: partition you get to choose which partion to shrink so that more space can be used for Over Provisioning the entire ssd.

 
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It sounds like there is provisioning and over-provisioning.

Re the provisioning, is it a real xs area of the ssd, or is it virtual? I would imagine it is virtual.

Similarly, are the partitions separate areas of the SSD hardware or is it all virtual? Viz., if you had C: and D: partitions and you did a massive amount of writing to D: only, would would there still be wear leveling throughout the drive or would the D: partition just fail one day while the C: partition still functioned?

Not meaning to derail, just to understand.
 
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I am also experiencing these problems when try to optimize through SSD magician. Although I have no real issues with this SSD it scared me a bit too. But the explanation by JohnyLucky did give me some trust back and having 7% OP above the default 7% seems enough to me.

Another Samsong Owner. (SSD 830)
 
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my 120GB Samsung 830 was freezing my pc every time i played borderlands 2 (awesome game) and i had to do a hard reset many times until i used the OP feature in magician software. hasn't frozen since. praise Jesus
 
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