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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 8:20 pm 
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I just enabled over provisioning on my PCIe M.2 system drive. This is supposed to improve durability and performance by cutting down the write cycles. Here is an interesating article in PDF format that is pretty pithy.
https://www.pny.com/File%20Library/Unas ... ioning.pdf

Going with the recommended setting on my drive of 10% I lose 46.58GB of storage but, over time, should see better performance and life span.

Does anyone else use this?

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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 8:38 pm 
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I don't have that setting for my Intel drives, but it does show me the estimated life expectancy of the drive and I will most likely change it out long before it wears out.


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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 8:57 pm 
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David, here is an article on how to do it with an Intel SSD.
https://siliconmechanics.zendesk.com/hc ... Intel-SSDs
Silicon Mechanics wrote:
It must be performed on an SSD that is in a completely clean state. This can be an SSD that is fresh out of the box that has never been used or by secure erasing the SSD.

I did not find this to be true on my Samsung M.2 drive. May just be an Intel thing... :dunno:

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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 9:22 pm 
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Do I use OP? No, I never even heard of it until this thread. My 5 year old SSD's built in utility still shows 100% of all sectors completely healthy. Heck, Samsung now has a series of SSDs with 10-year warranties. Is this OP stuff, whatever it is, even needed?

Acadia

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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 9:41 pm 
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If you read the PDF file you will see that, at times, a write to an SSD will actually take three writes. Over provisioning is supposed to prevent this. Forgetting longevity I would think that this would have to increase performance.

Is it really needed? Probably not but the idea of an SSD is to increase performance. If this does in fact increase performance I would consider it a good thing. I just enabled a few hours ago so it is too early to state any conclusions. That is one of the reasons that I posted this thread; to see if anyone has been using and can give any input.

PNY wrote:
As the drives move to a steady state after around
two to three hours of writes, the performance starts to suffer. In our
tests, reducing the capacity by 7% gives us over 80% performance
improvement once the drive starts to fill up.

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 Post Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 11:15 pm 
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I use the latest version of the Intel SSD toolbox. Secure erase is no longer available after Windows 8 came out. Not a real big deal to me, I optimize once a week as part of my backup routine and view the status of the drives as part of that.


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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 8:00 am 
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OP or not, you must realize that even the slowest SSD will run circles around the fastest mechanical drives. :auto1:

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 2:42 pm 
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Acadia wrote:
OP or not, you must realize that even the slowest SSD will run circles around the fastest mechanical drives. :auto1:

Acadia

Very true!

Still, with what is now available, an SSD is slow. M.2 drives which use a PCIe interface are much faster. My 240 GB SSD has a sequential read rate of 550 MB/sec. My 500 GB M.2 drive has a sequential read rate of 3200 MB/sec.

LOL! I remember when a 30 MB hard drive was big. Now I have a total of 11.74 TB in my main system. :ugeek:

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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 6:10 pm 
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I tried a couple of times to enable OP on my Crucial SSD via the Crucial "Storage Executive" software when I first bought it, it always failed.
I suspected it had something to do with the partition setup I had... e.g. data at the end of the drive, multiple partitions, or a software error?... I just never got round to working out what the issue was and forgot to dig into it because I guessed it might not be that big a deal?

Anyways I forgot about it until now and I'm gobsmacked to see that this time it actually applied, I've no idea what's changed, the build number of Storage Executive is the same so...??? :)


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 Post Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 7:05 pm 
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Must be computer gremlins Doddie. ;)

I can't set OP on the 240 GB SSD I use for video processing as I have never gotten my Sandisk software do anything. This is probably due to my drive setup. The Samsung software for my M.2 drive won't do it on the Sandisk. If I looked I could probably find a freeware utility that would do it. I should probably do that as I would probably visually see the performance increase as I write 6+ GB folders to the thing on a regular basis.

<edit> Apparently my SanDisk SSD comes from the factory with Over Provisioning preset.

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 6:17 pm 
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24 hours later and I can't say I've noticed much of a performance increase, I doubt even a 10% increase would be visible anyway.

Running a benchmark with "AS SSD Benchmark" it does appear it may have increased by a bit, but because I didn't think it would 'take' when I enabled OP I didn't run a test beforehand so don't have a true benchmark to compare it with.

I could, I guess, remove the OP and run a before and after but given that I had a "gremlin" that previously blocked the enabling of the function I think i'll leave it alone and hope that the improved "endurance" is all that Crucial claim it will be... though how anyone would know if the endurance has improved or not is beyond me ;)


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 7:23 pm 
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Any performance difference would probably not be noticed a lot as it does nothing for reads only writes. Unless doing very large file transfers I doubt that the performance increase would likely be user noticeable.

I just did performance benchmarks with Over Provisioning on and off. With it on I see random writes increased by ~270 MB/sec.. However my read speed drops. That surprises me as it is not supposed to affect read speeds at all. This is likely due to the drive interface. While my M.2 drive is classed as an SSD it uses a PCIe interface instead of SATA. Possibly why M.2 drives do not have it enabled by default. I'll take my chances on endurance and leave it off. BTW, I manually optimized by performing a Trim operation before running the benchmarks.

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 7:57 pm 
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jaylach wrote:
BTW, I manually optimized by performing a Trim operation before running the benchmarks.

Out of curiosity how did you do that, I've not found a way to force TRIM with Win7, i.e. Windows takes care of it, or it doesn't.

So far I've only once found a need to force anything on my SSD but it requires activating something Crucial call "Active Garbage Collection", that requires removing the data cable from the SSD and leaving the PC (in practice only the motherboard because without the SSD data there is no OS) and SSD powered on for 6-8 hours.
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An SSD that is not receiving TRIM commands and where Active Garbage Collection never runs properly, will never have the cells on the drive cleaned out after data is deleted. That will over time lead to an accumulation of 'junk' data, which slowly will clog up the drive. Eventually this well result in a drop in performance, and sometimes freezing during use of the SSD.

If that has happened to your SSD, you may simply need to force Active Garbage Collection to run on the drive by powering the SSD on and leaving it idle for 6 to 8 hours. After that, your drive’s functionality and performance should be restored.

Follow these steps to trigger Active Garbage Collection on your Crucial SSD:

On a desktop PC, simply disconnect the SATA cable from your SSD and only leave the power cable connected. After switching your PC on, the SSD will be in an idle state but still have power so Garbage Collection can function.
Source: http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SS ... a-p/118310


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 8:10 pm 
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I don't have a clue as to your SSD but my M.2 Samsung drive has the option included in Samsung Magician. I just select a tab to 'optimize' which includes running Trim. You may not see the option as the ability is only valid in Windows 8 and later... at least with the Samsung software.
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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 8:40 pm 
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Ah, that makes sense, the Crucial software doesn't offer TRIM as an option as far as I can tell, I thought perhaps you were using 3rd party software.
cf. http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/support-storage-executive

Things just got weird, as we know my SSD does support Over-Provisioning as an option (not immediately obvious in the link above) because I had it enabled... out of devilment and my odd perversion for finding new ways to bork my PC I tried to enable Momentum Cache, that was one of the other options that had always failed... this time it 'took' but it's removed my Over-Provisioning! :mad6:

I'm not even sure I remember correctly what "Momentum Cache" is, i could be well off the ball here but i suspect it may be some kind of ram drive thing... whatever it is it looks like that's my homework mapped out for the next couple of days :lol:


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 8:53 pm 
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Crucial's definition of Momentum Cache was staring me in the face on the page i posted, it's in tiny print on that page entitled "Enhance Burst Performance on Micron and Crucial SSDs Using Momentum Cache; whitepaper" so easily missed.

For anyone that's interested it's a PDF file and this is the direct link:
http://www.crucial.com/wcsstore/Crucial ... _cache.pdf


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 8:56 pm 
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Every SSD, at least all the quality ones, comes with its own "built-in" utility to keep it running at peak efficiency. In my opinion, messing beyond that is, well, getting messy. In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it!

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 8:57 pm 
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I've never even heard of "Momentum Cache"...

After a quick search you are in the ballpark as it being a RAM drive as it does use system RAM as a cache. While increasing performance, it is also supposed to help with endurance as there are more sequential writes and less random.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/crucia ... 29239.html

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:00 pm 
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I may have been too slow in editing/posting a reply to this thread, in case it's been missed either look up or read:
viewtopic.php?p=18808#p18808

Apologies where required :oops:


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:07 pm 
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Acadia wrote:
Every SSD, at least all the quality ones, comes with its own "built-in" utility to keep it running at peak efficiency. In my opinion, messing beyond that is, well, getting messy. In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it!

Acadia

In this case I do and don't agree Acadia. Many times I have also said to not fix if it isn't broke. Still, considering that I paid as much if not more for my 500 GB M.2 drive than my 6 TB mechanical drives, I'd like it to last as long as possible. ;) Granted that the lifespan of these drives is good. Still, if I can increase endurance without compromising performance, I consider the option worth looking at.

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:14 pm 
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Doddie wrote:
I may have been too slow in editing/posting a reply to this thread, in case it's been missed either look up or read:
viewtopic.php?p=18808#p18808

Apologies where required :oops:

None needed from my end. I caught the added post. ;) Actually the forum software advised me that there were additional posts made while I was posting. ;)

If I read things correctly it would be quite proper for Momentum Cache to kill your over provisioning as it seems that Momentum Cache replaces over provisioning using system RAM to do the same as what the unallocated space created with over provisioning does.

Of course this would mean less system RAM available...

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:21 pm 
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Acadia wrote:
Every SSD, at least all the quality ones, comes with its own "built-in" utility to keep it running at peak efficiency. In my opinion, messing beyond that is, well, getting messy. In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it!

Acadia

Like Jay said, under normal circumstances I'd agree with you, but i bought this drive very much on a whim during last years Black Friday sales and i was massively surprised that it came with a 3 year warranty so if breaking it utilising Crucial's own software means i have to replace it under warranty what have i got to lose other than a bit of time restoring my OS?

That said, if i was stressing the drive with software other than it was designed for then i might be a little more cautious ;)


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:38 pm 
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jaylach wrote:
If I read things correctly it would be quite proper for Momentum Cache to kill your over provisioning as it seems that Momentum Cache replaces over provisioning using system RAM to do the same as what the unallocated space created with over provisioning does.

Of course this would mean less system RAM available...

Therein lies the balancing act, if it makes the overall system faster I'd gladly live with less available RAM but if there's no noticeable performance improvement then why bother?

The court is out on that one but given that one of the selling points of SSD drives is their speed, and that the manufacturer actually recommends these 'tweaks' then i can't for the life of me see that any harm is done when an end user "enables" them :)


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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:53 pm 
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Doddie wrote:
jaylach wrote:
If I read things correctly it would be quite proper for Momentum Cache to kill your over provisioning as it seems that Momentum Cache replaces over provisioning using system RAM to do the same as what the unallocated space created with over provisioning does.

Of course this would mean less system RAM available...

Therein lies the balancing act, if it makes the overall system faster I'd gladly live with less available RAM but if there's no noticeable performance improvement then why bother?

The court is out on that one but given that one of the selling points of SSD drives is their speed, and that the manufacturer actually recommends these 'tweaks' then i can't for the life of me see that any harm is done when an end user "enables" them :)

The weird thing to me is that both these 'tweaks' are supposed to enhance both performance and endurance. I would normally expect an increase in performance to hurt endurance and the same the other way around. Yet these tweaks are reported from reliable sources to help in both aspects.

Still, with all the above stated, I have to say that I have disabled Over Provisioning. I have found that my gaming performance took a hit. Again, my guess in the difference is that I am working with an M.2 drive, not a SATA SSD. Since I have 32 GB of 3200 GHz. DDR4 RAM I'll have to look to see if Momentum Cache is available for my drive. LOL! Then, of course, the experiment starts again to see where the proper balance lies... Since I initially intended to build my main system with 16 GB RAM I guess that I have 16 GB RAM to play with. ;)

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 Post Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 10:03 pm 
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I'm beginning to suspect the balance lies where Acadia said it would... by leaving it alone!! LOL

I've just rebooted after enabling Momentum Cache and my AS SSD Benchmark has barely changed, I'm at a loss to understand how Crucial got anywhere near the benchmarks they've published in the PDF i linked to earlier... my only reasoning can be that their marketing department were bidding for a bonus or pay rise!

That said, if performance was increased by using system memory instead of SSD memory i could absolutely understand how reliability would be increased.


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