Aloha As my 9-year old Win7 Dell laptop was long-in-the-tooth and unable to satisfy the system requirements to run my photo editor of choice (Photoshop), I bought myself a birthday gift - a new Dell laptop with plenty of 'fire power'. I just unboxed it and upon examining the SSD's partition structure I am very confused as to why it contains 3 Recovery partitions? Are they all really necessary? Here is a snip of what the SSD looks like as delivered: So before I use Win10's Disk Management to substantially reduce C and create a large D partition for all of my data files I would sure appreciate some guidance as to keeping or deleting any/all of those Recovery partitions!
appster, The 16.88 GB partition probably contains a Dell backup image to restore the drive to factory settings. You can check to see which partition contains the "in use" Recovery Environment. From an Admin Command Prompt... diskpart select disk 0 list par (now you know the partition numbers) reagentc /info Can you post the list par and the reagentc output? Note, there is a partition which doesn't appear in Disk Management. The MSR. This appears in Diskpart. Do you intend to use BitLocker?
....re BitLocker, I've not used it in the past. Don't know if the security it affords outweighs any disadvantages? Please advise.
appster, Thanks. Your RE "is use" is in "partition4" so you could delete the 16.88 GB and the 1.36 GB partitions. I know you create your own backup images and don't need the Dell image. Then you could resize the Win10 partition smaller, slide the 990 MB partition up to the OS partition (or slide it to the end of the drive) and create a data partition in the unallocated free space. I have no use for BitLocker encryption and I suggest you disable it. It certainly makes restoring a backup image of the encrypted partition more complicated.
Aside from those recovery partitions, I'm really surprised to see that Dell didn't provide for over-provisioning the SSD. My 1TB Samsung 850 EVO (2.5") SSD has 94GB of dedicated space for that purpose - automatically allocated by the Samsung Magician utility (for better performance and extended life)! I imagine that new Dell laptop has an NVMe SSD - could it be that they do not need to be over-provisioned?
Scott, Free space inside or outside partitions counts as over provisioning space. On current usage, my Samsung NVMe drives have over 200 years before they reach maximum TBW (Terabytes written).
Brian, are you saying that over-provisioning will work with free space inside OS/Data partitions? If so, does that apply only to NVMe SSDs, or to all SSDs? Everything I've ever read, as well as Samsung Magician utility's functionality (when configuring my Samsung 850 EVO) requires dedicated free/unallocated disk space for over-provisioning! ------ Edit. I would also like to know if MBR vs. GPT affects how over-provisioning can be implemented?
Scott, I can't find my original references and current searches don't support my view. I thought Dynamic OP referred to free space in a partition, but maybe not. Sorry. I've been using NVMe drives for a few years without unallocated free space for OP. Some drives have up to 20 partitions, but no partition is more than 50% full. The drives are still performing fine.
Where does Samsung Magician put the OP partition that it creates? Hopefully not beside the Recovery. From my research on over provisioning, most people tend to say that it isn't necessary as long as you are not the type of person who uses an SSD almost full. The question is asked on Windows 10 Forums here.
Hadron, when enabling over-provisioning, Samsung Magician creates unallocated space at the end of the drive, dedicated for that purpose. Fwiw, your research findings are contrary to the recommendations of Samsung, Crucial, Intel, and MiniTool.
