Windows 10: Calling SSD users. What does your 'Optimise' window show ?

NavyLCDR said:

Why is it a good idea to set aside unallocated space?

It isn't. Like most advice on SSDs one sees on the internet it is advice from another decade that was most likely not true in the first place.

The SSD does it by itself. If you buy an enterprise class SSD it will generally have a higher percentage assigned to overprovisioning than a home one. This is to increase reliability.

This is invisible to you the user (or you the operating system). The SSD does not expose the full capacity.

There is an argument that running a SSD 99% full is detrimental but you won't be anyway. You'll be running 99% of the exposed capacity. In any case making a partition and leaving unallocated space is pointless. If you were really worried about it you should just make one partition and not fill it to 99%.

You could do better than read this Exploring the Relationship Between Spare Area and Performance Consistency in Modern SSDs

As lx07 stated above, the unallocated space happens internally within the drive and it's not exposed to the end user. There is no point in keeping a chunk of unallocated disk space at the end of your SSD as others have shown here. That's a misunderstanding of how the unallocated provisioning works in an SSD.

lx07 said:

You could do better than read this Exploring the Relationship Between Spare Area and Performance Consistency in Modern SSDs

and this:
https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam/...k-x400-ssd.pdf

The need to manually set aside extra space depends upon the design of the specific SSD and the anticipated usage of it. I don't have any space manually set aside on my 4 SSDs. My SSDs never get much more than 50% capacity used anyway.

NavyLCDR said:

and this:
https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam/...k-x400-ssd.pdf

What do we learn from that?

There is this quote from your 2016 SanDisk article

Configuring Overprovisioning
There are multiple ways to configure an SSD to any level of overprovisioning. They all require the drive to start in an empty and secure erased state. Fresh out of the box (FOB) will also work.
One simple method is to create a logical partition of the desired size using the disk management tool that comes with Windows OS. The unallocated space on the drive will not be used by the user and becomes free space for the SSD firmware to take advantage.

Is it an advantage though? They then go on to say (which is odd)

Summary
Whether your data needs are saving a large multimedia applications, or using a Multi-Function Printer operation, increasing the overprovisioning of the X400 will reduce its WAF and hence extend the endurance and lifetime of the SSD.

I can not imagine why a company selling SSD claims improving performance for multi-function printers is an advantage. It is clearly BS.

Thanks but I'll stick with Samsung (EVO until I'm rich enough for something else). I recently bought a knock off one made by a company called "KingFast" (with a silent "Fuc" I suppose) that works OK mind you. Good company they were.

I just buy the SSD and use it. I don't worry myself sick over it. Most times theg aren't filled, sometimes they get close and I clean up. My oldest SSD is 7 years old and going fine. I now have 6 SSDs and no problems with any of them.

Agree with pparks1 ^^^^^^

NavyLCDR said:

Agree with pparks1 ^^^^^^

Yes. I almost always do. A voice of reason :)

Hi,

lx07 said:

It isn't. Like most advice on SSDs one sees on the internet it is advice from another decade that was most likely not true in the first place.

The SSD does it by itself. If you buy an enterprise class SSD it will generally have a higher percentage assigned to overprovisioning than a home one. This is to increase reliability.

This is invisible to you the user (or you the operating system). The SSD does not expose the full capacity.

There is an argument that running a SSD 99% full is detrimental but you won't be anyway. You'll be running 99% of the exposed capacity. In any case making a partition and leaving unallocated space is pointless. If you were really worried about it you should just make one partition and not fill it to 99%.

You could do better than read this Exploring the Relationship Between Spare Area and Performance Consistency in Modern SSDs

That sums it up nicely.
Well put lx07.

Cheers,

lx07 said:

made by a company called "KingFast" (with a silent "Fuc" I suppose)

[Off topic]
Here in the UK, some years ago, there was a comedy/panel game broadcast on ever-so-respectable BBC Radio 4 called "King Stupid".
It was quite silly and for some reason was renamed in later series.
[/Off Topic]

@Mooly made a good observation though.

Windows doesn't run optimization when it claims. I have a new PC that I clean installed at the beginning of the month. I have not turned it off ever and it doesn't sleep. Despite being set to run weekly the GUI claims it hasn't. I ran optimistion manually on the 1st just after I finished installing Windows and it decided to run optimization on D and E partitions (but not C) on the 7th.

Weekly is clearly a rather vague term. Perhaps it means something other than every 7 days. Perhaps "Weekly" means "Once a month" or "when I feel like it". I'll watch it and see just out of curiosity...