Over Provisioning - "Free Space" or "Unallocated" -- Which Works?

[Radish]

Hi Folks,

I have two Samsung SSDs. I do not (any longer) install Samsung's "Samsung Magician" software as it is a heap of rubbish. So to set Over Provisioning (OP) I just set up partitions and format the drives with Windows 7 or, from a boot disk, I use Gparted. So I ended up with two disks which Windows 'Disk Management' shows as below:

As you can see Disk 0 partitioned by Windows has unformatted Free Space at the end of the drive, which I am hoping will be automatically used by the drive as OP space. Disk 1 was partitioned by Gparted and has 'Unallocated' space at the end of the drive, which I am hoping will be used by the drive as OP.

So my question is which of these two 'forms' of free space, 'Free Space' or 'Unallocated', is correct? Can the drives use either of these forms as OP or is only one of them correct?

P.S. I do know that, according to Windows, Disk 1 has 5 Primary partitions. However, that drive has ext4 formatted partitions and I'm guessing that Windows is just doing a dud job in identifying what the partitions are.

[jaclaz]

1) neither will work as "over provisioning"

Essentially over provisioning means, "out of the total amount of space accessible by the controller, let only part of it accessible by the OS (and the rest will be used by the controller for spare sectors)", not using some of the space that the OS can see is totally irrelevant. you need specific tools (by the SSD manufacturer) or hdparm (or similar) to effectively implement an opverprovisioning space, see (examples):

http://www.tech-g.com/2015/06/13/over-provisioning-ssd-in-linux/

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/over-provisioning-nand-based-ssds-better-endurance-whitepaper.pdf

2) check the COLOURS in the Disk Management view

Black top bar: Unallocated (where you can create EITHER a primary or an extended partition)
Dark Blue top bar: Primary Partition
Light Blue top bar: Logical Volume inside Extended
Light green frame: Extended partition
Light green top bar: Free Space (inside Extended, where you can ONLY create an additional logical volume)

If you prefer, in the first disk ALL space is allocated by the three primary partitions and by the extended one, but inside the extended one you made 2 volumes and there is some free space left "on the right", still within the extended partition, while in the second disk, most of the disk is allocated by 5 primary partitions (either the disk is GPT  or as you say Disk Manager is mis-representing the partitions ) , but there is some unallocated space "on the right", outside any partition.

Personally I don't buy that the ext4 volumes/partitions can create a fifth primary partition, there are 4 entries and no more in the MBR partition table, the filesystem used on any partition won't change this, anyway, if you believe that Disk Manager is misrepresenting the situation, you shouldn't use it.

 jaclaz
 

[Radish]

Thanks for the response jaclaz.

As you recommended I installed Samsung Magician and set the OP via that. I still think Magician is an ill-implemented piece of software.

For Disk 1, the disk with the odd number of primary partitions, it is definitely an MBR drive; I was just experimenting with Linux Mint to see if I wanted to move over to it again. I had used Mint for about a year a fair while back and in the end decided it wasn't a very user friendly OS so I went back to Win7. My experiment with Mint this time lasted two days and I decided it still wasn't user friendly enough. Ah, well. Disk 1 is now reformatted and I'll just use it as an emergency back up for my day to day Win7 system.