Modern NVME/SSD Recommendations - Overprovisioning and Indexing

Sir_George said:

I forgot to remove the "Recovery Partition." I use system imaging for my backups on separate drives, one at home and one offsite, so I don't need it. Thanks for pointing out my oversight.

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Hi,
Yeah I do the same
I just got tiered of seeing ms create another over and over again so I added a small partition before clean install and created a larger RE partition in front of C like ms did for decades but were way to small to enlarge it
Yep I posted my disk layout new norm on post 4

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
If that were true samsung magician wouldn't be doing the opposite when OP is activated.
Seriously C or D.. having unused space is not the same as unallocated free space.

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As I stated, there is a purpose for maintaining unallocated space for over-provisioning, and that purpose is to guarantee that a certain amount of space remains unused by the operating system and is available to the SSD's firmware for use. But, do or believe whatever, it matters not to me. An SSD does not partition via physical sectors on tracks like HDDs do. SSDs do not suffer degradation in performance from fragmentation like HDDs do. Free space on an SSD is free space and can be used by the firmware for trash collection tasks, regardless of where the Windows partition map shows that free space to be located.

ThrashZone said:

Seriously C or D.. having unused space is not the same as unallocated free space.

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From the viewpoint of Windows. Internal organization of the SSD has nothing to do with this.

NavyLCDR said:

As I stated, there is a purpose for maintaining unallocated space for over-provisioning, and that purpose is to guarantee that a certain amount of space remains unused by the operating system and is available to the SSD's firmware for use. But, do or believe whatever, it matters not to me. An SSD does not partition via physical sectors on tracks like HDDs do. SSDs do not suffer degradation in performance from fragmentation like HDDs do. Free space on an SSD is free space and can be used by the firmware for trash collection tasks, regardless of where the Windows partition map shows that free space to be located.

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Hi,
Not sure what to say to that
There has been two ssd manufacture apps crucial and samsung magician showing what both do after activating over provisioning and you still wont drink the water hehe
Classic blind.

Anibor_11 said:

From the viewpoint of Windows. Internal organization of the SSD has nothing to do with this.

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Your response to the partial quote makes zero sense.

ThrashZone said:

Your response to the partial quote makes zero sense.

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It makes perfect sense if you understand how SDDs work, and from your posts, you don't understand how they work.

Gotcha you two know better than the manufactures do

ThrashZone said:

Gotcha you two know better than the manufactures do

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No...just you, on this particular topic.

Just tried the portable version of Everything. It's amazingly fast.

One complaint: once it's launched, it doesn't shut down when its window is closed. I dislike that a lot.

bobkn said:

Just tried the portable version of Everything. It's amazingly fast.

One complaint: once it's launched, it doesn't shut down when its window is closed. I dislike that a lot.

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It needs to keep track of any additions to the hd. If it didn't, it wouldn't be doing it's job. Does Windows search ever "shut down" if you don't disable the service?

But okay, as we used to say in Brooklyn: "suzeach his own" LOL

If TRIM is supported (and verified that it works, as there exist some "less common" situations where it is enabled, yet still doesn't work regardless...) on a volume that is stored on SSD. Then logically, you'd expect that garbage collection will take care of freed-up space (i.e. space that previously was in use, but currently no longer is in use), and will take care of it in such a way that this space becomes available to the SSD firmware's internal optimization tasks. That is, exactly the same as how the unallocated space (i.e. the space that is not occupied by any partition) also is available to these same internal optimization tasks [the purpose of which is to do various things like performance optimizations, wear-levelling and the reduction of write amplification].

However... how garbage collection is implemented in the SSD depends on technical design factors that are determined by the manufacturer of the SSD. It isn't all that uncommon for garbage collection to not kick in until "the last moment" so it is delayed till right before the firmware detects that the SSD is low on empty blocks [that are empty either because they have been erased or because they don't contain any pages that have ever been written to]. So nope. The available free space on a partition is not necessarily always going to be fully equivalent to adjusting the additional OP space.

Further, while it is true that fragmentation on an SSD does not hurt performance the same way it hurts performance on a traditional HDD, severe fragmentation on an SSD not only hurts SSD performance, but also kills the SSD. As a matter of fact, almost all SSDs can be rendered permanently dead within just a few months after you bought them new, if you run a torture test on them that is specifically designed to add huge amounts of fragmentation the whole time. That's one of the reasons why, on Windows, Drive Optimizer automatically runs a partial defrag on SSDs [but only after it detects that the level of fragmentation has reached a certain threshold, which is a much higher threshold compared to the threshold that it uses for HDDs]. So nope ×2. Having at least some reasonable amount of contiguous space left is not unimportant on SSDs. Rather, the importance is 100% critical in nature.

The minimum amount of over-provisioning for an SSD is set at the factory. There is no "right" answer to how much additional over-provisioning you need. The "ideal" additional OP space could be 0% if the workload is light. Whereas on something like a server, data center or heavy workload client PC, changing it to 20% - 50% is still not necessarily always going to be overkill.

bobkn said:

Just tried the portable version of Everything. It's amazingly fast.

One complaint: once it's launched, it doesn't shut down when its window is closed. I dislike that a lot.

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Agree on the "amazingly." But I've developed the habit of closing the window with the X when I'm finished with it, and then right-clicking the icon in the tray and clicking Exit. I don't find that extra step too high a price to pay for the use of such a superb program. Of course, you can eliminate the "middle man" by just right-clicking the icon when you're finished with the program and clicking Exit, instead of clicking the X first. OR, you can exit the program by clicking File in the menu bar, and then Exit.

allan said:

It needs to keep track of any additions to the hd. If it didn't, it wouldn't be doing it's job. Does Windows search ever "shut down" if you don't disable the service?

But okay, as we used to say in Brooklyn: "suzeach his own" LOL

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Everything seemed to locate the files quickly on initial launch. I'd be willing to wait that long for subsequent uses.

I'm the sort of user who disables most programs from launching at startup. Especially those that I rarely need to use.

I regard most software as tools, not symbiotic additions to the OS.

Wisewiz said:

Agree on the "amazingly." But I've developed the habit of closing the window with the X when I'm finished with it, and then right-clicking the icon in the tray and clicking Exit. I don't find that extra step too high a price to pay for the use of such a superb program. Of course, you can eliminate the "middle man" by just right-clicking the icon when you're finished with the program and clicking Exit, instead of clicking the X first. OR, you can exit the program by clicking File in the menu bar, and then Exit.

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I tried the "portable" version of Everything.

I didn't get a notification in the tray, and no right-click and exit option. I looked for it. (I use that option fairly often. With the free version of Malwarebytes, for example.) If Everything can be configured to do that, I'd be more willing to use it.

Not sure why you don't want to install it rather than use the portable version, but okay.

bobkn said:

I tried the "portable" version of Everything.

I didn't get a notification in the tray, and no right-click and exit option. I looked for it. (I use that option fairly often. With the free version of Malwarebytes, for example.) If Everything can be configured to do that, I'd be more willing to use it.

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I get an icon in the tray as soon as I open Everything. That's it on the left (my icon; not the original), and a right-click on it brings up a menu with a rich Options section. The top section, UI, offers Run in background. Unchecking that makes Everything completely exit when you click the X. Unchecking show tray icon does what you'd expect.

I use the portable version, too, and I get the tray icon automatically, and I've set Everything NOT to run in background, so when I am finished with it, I just click the X, and it's gone.

I wish you'd try it again and see whether you get the tray icon this time, and the right-click Options window. If you will try again, and report here, and if you don't get the icon down there, I'll talk to the dev, David, and see what you can do to get it.

allan said:

Not sure why you don't want to install it rather than use the portable version, but okay.

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When trying new software, if there's a version that doesn't add entries to the Windows Registry, I'll try that first.

It's not an option with most software, I admit.

The existence of the Registry is one thing that makes me wistful for the days when I used Macs (30 years ago). Apple used nothing like the Registry. (The MacOS desktop could be rebuilt at will.)

Wisewiz said:

I get an icon in the tray as soon as I open Everything. That's it on the left (my icon; not the original), and a right-click on it brings up a menu with a rich Options section. The top section, UI, offers Run in background. Unchecking that makes Everything completely exit when you click the X. Unchecking show tray icon does what you'd expect.

I use the portable version, too, and I get the tray icon automatically, and I've set Everything NOT to run in background, so when I am finished with it, I just click the X, and it's gone.

I wish you'd try it again and see whether you get the tray icon this time, and the right-click Options window. If you will try again, and report here, and if you don't get the icon down there, I'll talk to the dev, David, and see what you can do to get it.
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Thanks. It seems to be vastly superior to Windows search, so it'd be worth a little effort. I assumed that what I was seeing was as it was designed to operate.

@bobkn VASTLY is an excellent term in this case.

But I'm afraid that many, many people who use Everything don't know about all the configuration options. I've seen another post on this forum in which the member complained about exactly what you didn't like, either.

Wisewiz said:

, and I get the tray icon automatically,

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Those who don't need/want the tray icon can uncheck the Show tray icon checkbox, which is directly below the Run in background checkbox that you already mentioned. Further, those who need to run it [Everything or Everything portable] as a standard user and who also want to use indexing on NTFS will also need to run the Everything Service, but it is still possible to make this service start/stop automatically by using your own script that runs the necessary commands for that: Everything Service - voidtools
So yeah... Everything's better than sliced bread for sure.