I'm still on Win10 and have been 'doing battle' with 2024-01 security update KB5034441. This requires the recovery partition size to be increased ... odd, as this machine has over 12GB across 3 recovery partitions! Anyway, advice on a loooong community discussion is that it is "essential" to disable over-provisioning while partitions are being resized. Whether this is correct or not, is a different issue.
Anyway, this idea of disabling over-provisioning brought me to Magician and that reports "This drive is not supported" for various functions: Diagnostic scan, Perf Optimisation, LED provisioning and... Over provisioning. So that then got me wondering...
Why doesn't Magician recognise/support a 981 NVMe? Is it becasue it's an OEM device?
Do I need a driver and/or firmware update for the SSD?
The PM981 is a low cost throw away OEM drive that keeps Dell's costs down by not paying extra for warranty, firmware updates, tech support, and Magician Support.
If you REALLY want Magician then buy a drive it supports.
A third party utility like Minitool Partition Wizard may do what you want.
That's not encouraging, but explains the difference between the 980 and 981. Not sure how 'throw-away' it is as I've read the RAM on these devices is soldered in and cannot be changed. Clearly Dell learning from Apple š¤¬ But thanks for the advice, at least explains things.
I'd got into this looking to disable over-provisioning while resizing partitions for the ... MS update. Any views on that? "Essential" as claimed, or meaningless to you?
Thanks for the advice, even if it's not great to hear about the drive spec in what is (was) supposed to be a top-end machine
Samsung may change the link I posted just so you know if it doesn't work..
I currently run 7 2&4 TB nvme ssd's in my machine, all over provisioned with lots of drive space left over so I'm not concerned about losing a few gigabytes here and there.
Heh, the "middle of the road" CPU alone in my daily driver computer cost more than that complete "top-end" machine. Don't feel bad, I just like to play hard.
Thanks @ddaniel51, but the questions wasn't about tools to use for partitioning, but given your knowledge of NVMes, whether you gave any credence to the advice that it is "essential" to disable over-provisioning on SSDs before moving/resizing partitions. It seems an odd claim given the level at which OP takes place and so I was wondering whether you might think the advice nonsense or essential to follow?
My understanding of OP is that it is the provision of excess (over-provision) of space so that the controller firmware can use more than one location to write data for the 'same' location and so provide "wear-leveling", i.e. not rewriting the same location over and over, but spreading the actual write location of the same address to different parts of NAND.
OP isn't 'making a partition larger', it is simply allocating excess storage space to the device controller so it can use multiple locations for write-intensive portions of a partition. The partition is the same size, it's just it is spread over a larger area of storage media.
For this 'problem' Win10 update (2024-01 Security Update KB5034441), it's necessary to increase the size of the WinRE partition permanently ... no restoration of partition size after the update is done. Some advice in the long discussion by the many people having problems with this update was a dire warning by one person that is was "essential" to disable OP on SSDs before the partition resizing. That got me to Magic to see if I could disable OP on my 981 NVMe and then learning it doesn't work on 981 OEM SSD. That discovery then got me here.
Given the low level at which OP operates I am 'surprised' by the OP warning. Also, others in the discussion do not seem to have suffered the 'catastrophic consequences' warned about despite resizing partitions with OP active.
My query is therefore simple: Do you, or do you not agree that it is "essential" to disable OP before resizing partitions on an SSD?
And then a part 2 would be, given Magic won't operate on the 981, I have no means to disable OP other than hoping something like MiniTool might have the ability to handle this and so do a better job than Windows diskpart through the CLI. Do you believe MiniTool can 'do necessary things, i.e. OP disabling that might be "essential", that diskpart cannot do?
