Hi guys.

With respect to the best possible setup for my PC and its drives, Samsung suggests that to set your SSD/NVMe SSD's to 'Overprovisioning' both lengthens their lives AND increases performance.

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/r...SUNG-Memory-Over-Provisioning-White-paper.pdf

Has anyone anything to offer/comment on regarding this procedure with respect to how it affects DAW performance? Don't want to fix what ain't broken, as the saying goes.

So - do it or no?

Thanks for all who vote and comment in advance.
Best to y'all this day.

 

As a Samsung user I have the: " Samsung - Magican "
with the following settings: AHCI Mode - Enabled and Trim Status Enabled. I prefer to leave it as it is.

 

NVMEs are probably so fast that you won't really notice the benefits of overprovisioning. Samsung drives are also known to come with overprovisioning already set from the factory and their software will allow you to set even more. I've had my 850 Pro and 850 Evo for 10 years with OP off (other than the factory 10%) and TRIM off (just in case) and they're still going strong. The speed increase I got from OP wasn't really worth the space for me.

 

Strict answer is "yes" and the lengthy answer would be something like: yes for older SSDs, running older OSes, and older chipsets. In other words for older computers like 5y or more. Although, a thought occurs to me about these new cheaper SSDs having shorter life spans than the older SLC/MLC ones... maybe I would say - if you have a big SSD 512GB+ that you use a lot, then turn it on and trim it monthly or weekly.

You can tell I'm a bit cautious guy. I've been bitten by a failed SSDs before, but that was about 5y+ ago. In the mean time they got much better even with less reliable flash-cells. You could say that the flash storage controllers and manufacturers got much better and more experienced, so it is a bit of an "oldie thing", I think, a thing of the past.

Cheers!

 

Last edited: May 8, 2022

I have a 980 PRO in mine. The theory of Over-provisioning is "a function that provides additional capacity specifically for data to be erased from an SSD, without interrupting system performance". It can also provide longer SSD life and slightly faster speeds but that is not the only purpose.

I did a quick test (screenshot) of a prior bench-test no too long ago. I could possibly get an extra 400mb/s read speed theoretically with over-provisioning - but as I am using M2 PCIE4 it's not that much when I am already getting 6597MB/s

 

Wow -thanks for your time and interest on this! Guess we'll 'leave things be' for now!

Thanks for conducting an experiment on my behalf. Glad nothing blew up! Best to you this fine Sunday!
Later and with much appreciation,
Cardamom

 

You are most welcome. It is very difficult to blow it up if you follow the instructions to the letter. Often a lot of motherboards have a single NVME slot close to the CPU or in areas that have high heat. These days, many have up to four NVME slots. It is worth the extra few dollars to purchase a heatsync sleeve for the NVME if your mainboard is similar to that description. Many of the newer mainboards supply you with one too.

Hopefully they will come down in price now COVID seems to be gradually dissipating so it can be more feasible to buy a recent model that is 2TB-4TB.

 

I'll do it. But for the SSD longevity itself, not for DAW use.
It increases the lifespan, therefore the progressive lost of speed is also slower.
Doesn't make a new SSD faster. Well, barely? It does make an old SSD less slower than a new one.

Edited: I may have it half-wrong after reading some of the posts here...

 

Last edited: May 8, 2022

I may be wrong, but imo it's just another marketing bullshit completely,
overprovisioning is something every ssd should do on their own (have certain capacity of data pool hidden from user) and every sane user should not fill their SSD drive to its maximum capacity to prevent performance loss and lifespan failures,
just because Samsung uses fancy Magician app (and only in Windows) to partition out portion of the disk upon user consent is just a simplified/complicated way of doing that on your own within Disk management of your operating system...

 

Not wrong in the true sense of the word. It varies from machine to machine. everyone automatically says "It's the NVME".
To truly do an accurate test you'd have to take every attachment in daughter boards (GPU's etc) and extra HDD's off and be sure the Mainboard that says it does "X" bus speed under optimal circumstances and the RAM and CPU do exactly what they say. It will always vary.

The fact is with or without over provisioning, A high end NVME on a PCIE4 bus, theoretically, should do between 6300-7300MB/s and PCIE3 half of that in read/write speeds.
The only logical scenario I can see for changing any critical settings is to also massively improve read/write speeds drastically if you record and mix audio a lot. Is it extremely noticeable for daily tasks in difference from PCIE 3 going to PCIE4? NO, only in some things but not overall.

EDIT P.S. - I read up a bit on PCIE 4 - What some people deduced makes sense which was until every single part of the entire system is fully PCIE 4, we won't see the true benefits of each component.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 8, 2022