Info on SSD Performance

[Ed P]

I found this article on SSDs interesting.

https://codecapsule.com/2014/02/12/coding-for-ssds-part-6-a-summary-what-every-programmer-should-know-about-solid-state-drives/

I found the section on Over-provisioning (section 27) particularly useful. If I read it correctly, the maximum life and performance will be obtained simply by deliberately making the partition of a drive 75% of the drive rated capacity and formatting just that 75%. The SSD will still make use of the full 100%, but get better read/write and TRIM operations from it.

 

[keith with the teef]

Over provisioning.

Hmmm.

This is crazy, but.

I’m not to sure about this, but as I understand, the latest SSD’s are made windows friendly, as in, EG C drive: A 100GB ssd is actually 125Gb with 25GB hidden and thats to protect windows from doing weird stuff if the drive becomes full.

Yes?

No?

 

[Ed P]

I honestly do not know!

I use Disk Management to set up an SSD, and that is where I now format (say) a 500Gb drive as 400Gb to give it 25% over provisioning.

What I do know is that when my wife filled her drive up to 99% or so and kept using it, the machine went scatty due to it not having enough swap space – it triggered all sorts of issues including the screen flashing and the PC appearing to be bricked for many seconds. If Windows now manages that situation on new disks that would be great.

[keith with the teef]

Ed P wrote:

including the screen flashing and the PC appearing to be bricked for many seconds.

LOL.

I guess this grey are is well overdue for M$ to take a proper look at and put it to bed.

I really don’t think it follows in this day and age and its summat I recon should be fixed fixed.

Its a bit like the millennium clock you just don’t know whats gonna happen. 🙂

[Dave Rice]

Two different problems, over provision and the disk being full.

Windows should warn you when a drive gets >90% full as it cannot cope with full drives, as you’ve found out.

Over provisioning by not formatting x% of a drive is a new one on me, but reading up now I get it. It seems however that the choice of controller and the technology it uses can have as much impact, depending on your workload. I’m not going to lose sleep over it though.

[Ed P]

My wife tends to ignore trivial things like the disks being nearly full, and other warning signs! I therefor need to make a PC as robust as possible, especially as SSDs drop dead without any warning. Over-provisioning tends to put off that evil day, maybe even until the whole setup gets changed. The other thing I have done is to put in far more ram than she needs and turn off Windows Paging as that can cause a huge number of SSD writes.

Of course backups are an essential part of all this, but they only become useful after the disaster has hit.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve just been building a couple of NUC 11s with Crucial drives and the Crucial management software has an option to set over provisioning.

It attempts to shrink the last accessible partition by X% (which it recommends or you can set) but failed. No problem, as advised, a quick trip to Disk Management to shrink the partition, then back to the Crucial software. The free space is recognised and you just click the Set OP button and it’s done.

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