SSDs have become part of the equipment of any modern PC, also thanks to their speed of writing / reading and their greater lightness compared to traditional mechanical disks. On SSDs the information is saved as if they were on a large "USB stick", therefore inside the chip, able to maintain the information thanks to the static current contained in numerous "cells". But what if a cell in the chip no longer holds a charge ">
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What is Over Provisioning
Over Provisioning is a file system creation technique within the SSD that has the purpose of providing "backup cells", so that the drive, in a completely automatic way, can replace over time those no longer able to hold charge. To give a practical example, let's imagine using all the space provided by the SSD for the creation of the file system where we will place Windows (or any other system): after a few years some of the cells used no longer work, causing slowdowns and hangs to the system.
If instead a part of the disk space is not used (unallocated), the SSD will be able to exploit those unallocated cells as substitutes for the damaged ones, so as to maintain the consistency of the file system and the maximum speed even after several years.
For home use it is advisable to leave 7% of the total space of the SSD as unused (unallocated), so as to have enough spare cells for the next 10 years. If, on the other hand, we use an SSD to store data (therefore numerous writes and reads), the space to be reserved for Over Provisioning increases up to 28% .
How to activate Over Provisioning
As intuited from the previous chapter, to activate Over Provisioning it is sufficient to leave a part of the disk space as unallocated. To do this we can act immediately after the installation of Windows (which basically uses all the space) by right clicking on the bottom left of the Start menu and selecting the Disk Management item.
Once the manager window is open, we identify the SSD among all the disks present, right click on the partition identified as ( C:) and select the item Reduce volume .
At this point we carry out a calculation, even with the calculator integrated in the system: we subtract 7% from the real capacity of the disk, then convert the value in GB into MB, so that we can insert it into the reduction window that will appear.
To help you with the conversion, we can use a data value conversion site like the one available here -> GB to MB Converter.
At the end of the configuration, click on Reduce and wait a few minutes; at the end we will see the unallocated space to the right of the C: partition, which will be used automatically by the SSD as Over Provisioning (it will appear as a black partition with the text Unallocated ).
If we want to use a program other than the one included in Windows, I recommend using EaseUS Partition Master as alternative software.
Again, just right-click on partition C: and use the item Reduce volume, so as to set up a smaller capacity and obtain the space necessary for over provisioning. Obviously, in order for this technique to be truly effective, we no longer use this space, even if the SSD is filling up: these cells are in reserve and as such must be unassigned, otherwise the disk may stop working at the same time in which we try to recover this space.
The sooner we create the Over Provisioning partition, the sooner it can act in case of cell problems: the longer we wait, the greater the risk of not being able to use even the spare cells. That's why this technique must be applied as soon as the SSD is mounted on the PC and the operating system is installed, so that it can act even before a problem can arise.
Other useful tips to safeguard the SSD
In addition to the application of the Over Provisioning technique, in this part of the guide we will show you other useful tips that we can apply to increase the performance and duration of any SSD on the market.
- Set the "High Performance" power option to always keep the performance of the disk and SATA ports high
- Disable the Prefetch and Superfetch functions, which are useful on mechanical disks but completely useless on SSDs
- Disable indexing of the disk, which reads and writes to the disk frequently, decreasing the duration
- Frequently carry out the TRIM command, essential for optimizing cells with recently deleted data (a sort of defragmentation, but much more advanced)
All these tips are also part of the guide on how to keep the PC SSD fast; options to change in Windows 10, which we advise you to read to apply the above recommendations.
In another guide, on the other hand, we have collected all the SSD programs released by the various manufacturers, who can help us manage and create Over Provisioning, as well as monitor the health of the SSD.
If instead we need to move Windows from a mechanical disk to an SSD, we have created a complete and exhaustive guide, available as a link below.
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