Solved Does Samsung 990 Pro have Overprovisioning from the factory or I have to do it?

I have SSD Samsung 990 Pro 4TB. There is overprovisioning from the factory or I have to set it up?
Thank you.

Hi.

It’s already setup for over-provisioning but you can access it to make changes where as Samsung Magician lets you create an additional OP area by shrinking the usable partition slightly.

• Samsung keeps ~6.7% of the NAND hidden from the user.
• That’s why the drive’s formatted capacity in Windows is about 3.64 TB, not a full 4 TB.
• This space is permanent, invisible, and managed entirely by the SSD controller. You can’t disable or change it.
• But as I mentioned above, you can add additional reserved space. For example:
  • Light/normal use → No extra OP needed.
  • Heavy write workloads → 5–10% extra.

You have to use Samsung Magician to do it.


And you have to keep it installed

Samsung already keeps ~6.7% of the NAND hidden from the user, for over-provisioning.

There is around 7% of overprovisioning on consumer SSD drives as standard.

If you need more then the Manufacturers app can do that, but obviously at the expense of capacity.

antspants said:

https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/others/Samsung_SSD_845DC_04_Over-provisioning.pdf

Click to expand...

I use a 2 TB 2280 Samsung 990 Pro and a 4 TB 2280 Pro NVME type not SSD.

As far as I know, all Samsung 9**s have over provisioning already set, can’t be changed but Magician can add. All. I am yet to read differently.

Josey Wales said:

I use a 2 TB 2280 Samsung 990 Pro and a 4 TB 2280 Pro NVME type not SSD.

Click to expand...

I’d be interested to see if it states anywhere that your NVMe doesn’t have over provisioning already set.

Samsung Magician doesn't say whether there is factory over provisioning for the 990 EVO Plus but does allow you to set it yourself.

In that example the total provisioning would be about 17%.
The setting is for additional space, not setting the total.

Samsung and Micron, other manufacturers are vague about the amount of factory set over provisioning.

Micron Storage Executive has similar facility.

antspants said:

As far as I know, all Samsung 9**s have over provisioning already set, can’t be changed but Magician can add. All. I am yet to read differently.



I’d be interested to see if it states anywhere that your NVMe doesn’t have over provisioning already set.

Click to expand...

Why would one need Magician Software to do it then? When you do over provision it with Magician and un install it, the over provisioning goes away. I see no need to OP a 2TB & 4TB NVME's

SylverCheetah53 said:

I have SSD Samsung 990 Pro 4TB. There is overprovisioning from the factory or I have to set it up?
Thank you.

Click to expand...

Unless you plan on filling the drive to its full capacity you don't need to overprovision it.

The 4TB model of the Samsung 990 PRO has a permanent, or factory OP (not user-configurable) of 10%, which translates to 370.7 GB for the 4TB model.

With light use, you normally don't need to add more OP space, as this specific SSD has 2400 TBW endurance. So, for the vast majority of average consumers it should last multiple lifetimes, but some people might want to use it in such manner that more than just a few TB of data gets written to it on an almost daily basis, in which case adding more OP space to it via Samsung Magician's OP setting could make better sense.

Another example of when this could make sense is if the type of workload on the SSD requires constant or near-constant heavy random I/O behavior patterns. This is especially true if these patterns involve huge amounts of additional new data being written with an abundance of small chunks getting scattered heavily with frequent deletions at a sustained, exceptionally high rate like happens usually during prolonged periods of complex, very heavy database server activities, for example.

Additional OP space gives the SSD controller more opportunities to catch up and makes the SSD's own internal background processes run more efficiently. One important reason why you might not want these processes to lose too much of their efficiency is because it causes extra wear on the SSD, and starts to hurt performance, significantly under certain, specific, conditions like the ones that I explained above.

Normal use does not require overprovisiong. Any unused space on the drive is equivalent to OP of the same size.

It is a concept left over from the time when there was no file system dynamic TRIM. But NTFS has dynamic TRIM.

There are some cases where you may want to overprovision: if you use a file system like FAT32 that does not support dynamic TRIM. This gives you some needed wiggle room with the inferior garbage collection until you can use the manual TRIM command in the defrag utility.

Unallocated space, or space that isn't a part of any partition on the drive is used as additional OP space (i.e. actual OP space, not "equivalent to" OP space). Whereas unused, or free available space on the partition(s) on the drive is not used as OP space, nor is equivalent to OP of the same size. Only if the SSD in question uses something like DuraWrite technology from Seagate, which Samsung SSDs do not use, data compression and deduplication are used to create additional (dynamic) OP "under the hood". (The size of this specific type of OP space part depends on the compression factor, or entropy of the data stored on the drive.)

Whether TRIM is enabled, doesn't make a shred of difference to any of all this except for the fact that TRIM helps (indirectly) to increase the size of the above mentioned type of dynamic OP [that results from Seagate's DuraWrite].

However, it is still true that TRIM also contributes to why user-specified OP is not usually necessary for typical consumer use. For enterprise or write-heavy environments, combining TRIM with user-specified OP yields the best results—and this continues to hold true also for modern SSDs.

Both TRIM and user-specified OP reduce write amplification: OP does this by giving the SSD more room to manage data; TRIM does it by telling the SSD which data is no longer valid, so it doesn’t waste time rewriting it. Both improve garbage collection: OP gives the SSD breathing room; TRIM makes garbage collection smarter.

Even so, unused space plus TRIM (or dynamic TRIM) and user-specified OP are not equivalent to each other. Instead, they play complementary roles: TRIM helps maintain performance over time, while OP helps sustain performance under heavy or sustained workloads. Think of OP as reserving extra lanes on a highway for emergency vehicles—they’re always available and improve traffic flow. TRIM is like clearing debris from the road—it doesn’t add lanes, but it keeps existing ones usable and efficient.

The micron/crucial software creates unallocated space after the last partition for user defined OP . I don't think the software needs to be kept installed after that.