[SOLVED] SSD listed as a Thinly Provisioned Space

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KevinDell

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Apr 17, 2015
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Hello, about a year and a half ago I bought another NVME SSD from Sabrent (if that matters) upon checking the health of the drive I noticed that it was listed as a "thinly provisioned Space" in storage optimization.

I've learned that this basically set the drive up like a raid configuration but only in software. And it's normally related to virtualachines. Neither of which I use or plan on using.

I haven't noticed any negative performance, but my OCD is bugging me about this.

Is there any theoretical downside to having the drive setup like this for regular use? Is there a way to reconfigure the drive without loss of files? Would reconfiguring the drive even make a difference?


Thanks in advance
 
Solution
F
951.88 GiB = 1022.1 GB

That's a strange size for an SSD. What capacity is reported by CrystalDiskInfo?

According to Wikipedia, thin provisioning is when there is more virtual capacity than real physical capacity. In other words, the OS sees more storage capacity than there is at the current time. The idea is that you can add more physical capacity in the future. That said, I don't understand what is going on.

Disk 0 and Disk 2 are a tiny bit smaller than I would have expected. I would check them with CrystalDiskInfo also.

Edit: Is it possible that a 1024 GB drive was cloned to a 1000 GB drive?
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951.88 GiB = 1022.1 GB

That's a strange size for an SSD. What capacity is reported by CrystalDiskInfo?

According to Wikipedia, thin provisioning is when there is more virtual capacity than real physical capacity. In other words, the OS sees more storage capacity than there is at the current time. The idea is that you can add more physical capacity in the future. That said, I don't understand what is going on.

Disk 0 and Disk 2 are a tiny bit smaller than I would have expected. I would check them with CrystalDiskInfo also.

Edit: Is it possible that a 1024 GB drive was cloned to a 1000 GB drive?
 
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Solution
fzabkar said:
951.88 GiB = 1022.1 GB

That's a strange size for an SSD. What capacity is reported by CrystalDiskInfo?

According to Wikipedia, thin provisioning is when there is more virtual capacity than real physical capacity. In other words, the OS sees more storage capacity than there is at the current time. The idea is that you can add more physical capacity in the future. That said, I don't understand what is going on.

Disk 0 and Disk 2 are a tiny bit smaller than I would have expected. I would check them with CrystalDiskInfo also.

Edit: Is it possible that a 1024 GB drive was cloned to a 1000 GB drive?
Click to expand...



Disk 0,1, and 2 are all old drives, Disk 1 has nothing but some old boot partitioning and windows logs. Not even sure why I kept it in the new build, probably just in case. Disk 0 is an older WD Blue, which may be why it's slightly smaller than expected? They all show the same storage in CrystalDiskInfo as they do in disk management.

Before I even had the Sabrent drive I migrated my windows install onto the Samsung drive. But nothing was ever cloned onto the Sabrent drive.

What exactly should I expect to see in CrystalDisk? Crystal disk shows the same total storage (Drive E actually has one extra GB) as disk management and the storage settings. I don't remember specifying the drive as being a provisioned space of any kind.
 
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Disk capacities are set according to the IDEMA standard.

This is the formula:

  • total LBAs = 97696368 + (1953504 x (enter_GB_here – 50))

A 1024 GB drive has 2000409264 sectors. That's 953.87 GiB / 1024.21 GB.

A 1000 GB drive has 1953525168 sectors. That's 931.51 GiB / 1000.2 GB. My 1TB SSD shows exactly this capacity in Disk Management. My 160GB HDD also shows the correct IDEMA capacity.

A 120GB drive has 234441648 sectors, That's 111.79 GiB. The two Kingston SSDs differ by 0.1 GiB. That should not be the case.

@KevinDell, can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

This will show us the actual capacities of the physical drive and its partitions(s).
 
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fzabkar said:
Disk capacities are set according to the IDEMA standard.

This is the formula:

  • total LBAs = 97696368 + (1953504 x (enter_GB_here – 50))
A 1024 GB drive has 2000409264 sectors. That's 953.87 GiB / 1024.21 GB.

A 1000 GB drive has 1953525168 sectors. That's 931.51 GiB / 1000.2 GB. My 1TB SSD shows exactly this capacity in Disk Management. My 160GB HDD also shows the correct IDEMA capacity.

A 120GB drive has 234441648 sectors, That's 111.79 GiB. The two Kingston SSDs differ by 0.1 GiB. That should not be the case.

@KevinDell, can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

This will show us the actual capacities of the physical drive and its partitions(s).
Click to expand...


I think this is what you wanted? Imgur album of all disk partition page in DMDE
https://imgur.com/a/6W4qBKb
View: https://imgur.com/a/6W4qBKb


part of the reason that the Sabrent drive shows an abnormal amount of storage (shown as Microsoft Storage Space Device in DMDE) is that a thinly provisioned space can allocate more than what on the actual physical drive in preparation to add more storage devices in the future. Just a guess as to why it may look weird?
 
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WD10EZEX is a hard drive, not an SSD. DMDE shows that its capacity is 1953525168 sectors, which is the correct IDEMA capacity, namely 931.51 GiB / 1000.2 GB. However, Disk Management reports a capacity of 931.39 GiB.

Therefore it appears that your Disk Management HDD/SSD storage capacities correspond to the sums of the capacities of all partitions rather than the capacities of the physical drives. That is totally different to my installation. :-?

Edit:

I now see plenty of Disk Management screenshots that show both capacity formats. I'm now wondering whether this is due to different treatment for GPT and MBR partitions. Mine are all MBR.

Sorry if I've introduced a red herring.
 
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I think I understand what is happening.

Here is the NVMe specification:

https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVM-Express-1_4-2019.06.10-Ratified.pdf

The SSD is divided into Namespaces. Each Namespace is a block of LBAs that looks like a separate SSD. In the present case there is only one Namespace covering the whole SSD.

The Namespace is low level formatted and a block of LBAs is assigned to it. When the SSD identifies itself, it reports its Namespace Size (NSZE). The Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD has an actual capacity of 1024 GB, so I would expect that to be the NSZE.

Within this block is Namespace Capacity (NCAP). "This field is used in the case of thin provisioning and reports a value that is smaller than or equal to the Namespace Size". Just as SATA SSDs can have over-provisioned space, NVMe SSDs can reserve some space for the firmware. I expect that the Sabrent SSD is actually reporting an NCAP value of 1022 GB. CrystalDiskInfo or DMDE should tell us what is happening.

The SSD also reports Namespace Utilization (NUSE) for each Namespace. "This field indicates the current number of logical blocks allocated in the namespace". A block is allocated when the OS writes to it, and is deallocated when it is TRIM-ed. TRIM is a SATA function, whereas the equivalent NVMe function is Deallocate. In the OP's case the NUSE value is currently 95%. That is, 5% of the user area is TRIM-ed (deallocated), and 95% is in use.

Edit:

I'm not sure that I have correctly understood the 95% number reported by Windows.

I'm also wondering whether Windows automatically TRIMs (or deallocates) this SSD since it doesn't explicitly detect it as an SSD.
 
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