Help needed in Over Provisioning a new 600p

[idata]

I've recently bought a new Skull Canyon NUC, and an Intel 600p SSD along with it. I want to over provision the SSD prior to installing the OS, but have not found any guide or FAQ specific to this SSD, and I'm very wary, especially since I do not have another system on which the 600p can be installed. How do I over provision the drive safely before having an installed OS?

[idata]

Hello DBayes,

Intel Solid State Drives come pre-configured with 7% to 10% over provisioning space. This is beyond the advertised drive capacity and is not visible to the user. For example: 550GB - 7% (38GB) = 512GB.

As a result, it is not necessary for users to manually over-provision their Intel SSDs.

However, to answer your question; you can reduce the usable capacity of, or over-provision, a drive several ways:

Important: The SSD must be new, fresh out-of-the-box or must be erased using the ATA SECURITY ERASE UNIT command immediately before adjusting the usable capacity.

• (Recommended) Create partition that occupy only the desired usable capacity and leave the remaining capacity unused. This method will not assist to ensure long term performance, but rather save storage space to be used later.
• (Advanced) Use the ATA standard SET MAX ADDRESS command to limit the user accessible capacity of an SSD. This feature, also referred to as Host Protected Area (HPA) in Linux*, can also be modified using the https://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/ hdparm* utility with -Np command, or the http://www.hdat2.com/ HDAT2* utility under DOS. Note that this method will change the drive capacity reported to the user through various utilities.

Note: Any links provided for third party tools or sites are offered for your convenience and should not be viewed as an endorsement by Intel.

Please let us know if this helps, or if you still have questions.

Best regards,

Carlos A.

[idata]

I have created a bootable USB drive, and successfully ran HDAT2 from it. It failed to recognize SMART data and failed to recognize (and therefore offer) the option of SET MAX ADDRESS, though it did recognize the proper size.

I ran Rufus 2.11.995 to create the bootable USB drive, and selected MS-DOS as the platform. I then copied hdat2exe_52.exe (downloaded directly from the developer's site) to the root directory of the drive. I am now in the process of retrying it via a Linux boot and hdparm.

[idata]

Hello DBayes,

That's correct, I completely overlooked the fact that the 600p Series is NVMe* not SATA. Meaning some of those commands will not apply.

I believe hdparm* should allow you to increase the spare area of the drive. However this tool does require Linux*. I will research the issue further and get back to you.

• https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SSD_Over-provisioning_using_hdparm SSD Over-provisioning using hdparm.

If you're able to successfully complete the task before I post an update, please let us know.

Best regards,

Carlos A.

[idata]

Hello DBayes,

We have checked with our additional resources and at this point we're still validating our tools to operate at best performance on our Intel® SSD 600p Series. We can't commend on third party tools for this process as of yet.Again, our consumer drives already come configured from factory with a 7 to 10% of over provisioning space, according to capacity and model. So further over provisioning is not actually required.Best regards,Carlos A.