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Old March 24th 21, 11:17 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_3_]
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Posts: 24
Default SSD "overprovisioning" (was: Why is it not letting me extend the partition?)

On Tue, 23 Mar 2021 at 23:25:49, VanguardLH wrote (my
responses usually follow points raised):
Yousuf Khan wrote:

[]
drive, so I had to restore to a new SSD from backups. That took a fair
bit of time to restore, but the new drive is twice as large as the old
one, but it created a partition that is the same size as the original. I
expected that, but I also expected that I should be able to extend the
partition after the restore to fill the new drive's size. However going
into disk management it doesn't allow me to fill up that entire drive.
Any idea what's going on here?

Yousuf Khan


There are a lot of partition manipulations that the Disk Manager in
Windows won't do. You need to use a 3rd party partition manager. There
are lots of free ones. I use Easeus Partition Master, but there are
lots of others.


(I use that one too. It was the first one I tried and does what I want,
so I haven't tried any others, so can't say if it's better or worse than
any. The UI is similar to the Windows one - but then maybe they all
are.)

You might want to investigate overprovisioning for SSDs. It prolongs
the lifespan of SSDs by giving them more room for remapping bad blocks.
SSDs are self-destructive: they have a maximum number of writes. They
will fail depending on the volume of writes you impinge on the SSD. The
SSD will likely come with a preset of 7% to 10% of its capacity to use
for overprovisioning. You can increase that. A tool might've come with
the drive, or be available from the SSD maker. However, a contiguous
span of unallocated space will increase the overprovisioning space, and
you can use a 3rd party partition manager for that, too. You could
expand the primary partition to occupy all of the unallocated space, or
you could enlarge it just shy of how much unallocated space you want to
leave to increase overprovisioning.


How does the firmware (or whatever) in the SSD _know_ how much space
you've left unallocated, if you use any partitioning utility other than
one from the SSD maker (which presumably has some way of "telling" the
firmware)?

If, after some while using an SSD, it has used up some of the slack,
because of some cells having been worn out, does the apparent total size
of the SSD - including unallocated space - appear (either in
manufacturer's own or some third-party partitioning utility) smaller
than when that utility is run on it when nearly new?

If - assuming you _can_ - you reduce the space for overprovisioning to
zero (obviously unwise), will the SSD "brick" either immediately, or
very shortly afterwards (i. e. as soon as another cell fails)?

If, once an SSD _has_ "bricked" [and is one of the ones that goes to
read-only rather than truly bricking], can you - obviously in a dock on
a different machine - change (increase) its overprovisioning allowance
and bring it back to life, at least temporarily?
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep
enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?" - Jean Kerr