Z11 SSD Disk Management Questions

I have several questions related to disk management of the SSD memory:

1. My computer has 384GB, and Disk Management shows a total of 357GB. Is the difference (the other 27GB) the area reserved for bad memory management and for GC?

2. I'd like to increase the area available for GC. Should I leave another 8% unallocated for a total available of 15%, or should I leave 15% unallocated in addition to the 27GB?

3. Assuming that I should use the 'Shrink Volume' function to unallocate space from C:, I find that my 349GB C: can be shrunk by a max of only 162GB to a 'minimum' size of 187GB. Why would this be?

4. My intent is to make the C: drive ~80GB, make a D: drive of ~200GB, and leave the rest unallocated for GC. How should I do this?​

TIA

 

Yes and no.
Samsung is one of the less honest drive manufacturers, who will sell a drive based on the total amount of storage, not how much is available after deducting internal usage. What OCZ calls a 120 GB drive, and Intel calls an 80 GB drive, Samsung will call 128 and 96, respectively.
They can (almost) get away with it because of how HDDs (which are not using chips that count in powers of 2) are sold with marketing gigabytes, where 1 GB is 1000000000 bytes, and not 1073741824 bytes. Your 357 GB is 383.3 marketing GB, which they round up to 384. The difference is indeed what's used for internal housekeeping (bad block mapping, garbage collection, temporary storage).

This is, of course, very (and intentionally) misleading. By using "384 GB", they indicate that they're using powers-of-two (384 = 3 * 128), but in reality, they're not.

That is entirely up to you. The more you give it, the better. 15% isn't a magic figure, and the more you leave unused, the more the garbage collection and wear levelling will have to work with.

Files or special blocks on the NTFS volume that can't be moved, usually because they're in use or are "special" (like a file allocation table). This can usually be improved by running a boot time defragmenter once -- at boot time, before Windows is loaded, these files can be moved.

 

Thanks, Arth1. How do I run the boot-time defragmenter -- before Windows has loaded?

 

Interesting. I thought Intel X25-M 160gb uses 10x16GB memory chips, and the 80GB version uses 10x8GB ones.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2808/2

 

I recommend downloading and installing a trial version of Raxco PerfectDisk 11. It has a checkmark for "Boot time" defragmenting. Check that and reboot, and Bob's your uncle.
(Since it's an SSD, you do not want to run defragmenting on a regular basis -- just to fix up things like the above, or do very infrequent "consolidate free space" runs. Raxco Perfectdisk is one of the best tools, though -- well worth the low price.)

 

Ouch. You are right -- Intel appears to now market their drives with the internal capacity too. I know that the X25-E 64 GB drive has 10 chips on it too, for a total of 10-channel 80 GB. But Intel sells it as 64 GB, cause that's all that's addressable. Perhaps with the -M series, they decided to let honesty play second fiddle to marketing?

 

Thanks, however Bob is not quite yet my uncle. I downloaded PerfectDisk 11, selected the boot-time option, restarted, and it ran a defrag pass at boot-time, apparently moving a few things. However, upon subsequent restart, I have the same situation -- it won't allow me to shrink C: beyond a very large minimum size. It's a curiosity what unmovable file(s) may be in the middle of the memory of my brand-new computer.

 

Just to add to arth1's detailed and excellent description, converting from base 10 to base 2 (roughly 7%), is what "some" vendors will state is the formatted capacity, though seemingly rare.

Seagate settled a lawsuit in 2007, I believe, related directly to this marketing tactic.