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Do I just leave some space not partitioned and thats all?

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    please edit your question to indicate the version of Ubuntu yoou are using and what size SSD you propose. Will the SSD be your primary partition?
    – graham
    Aug 3, 2019 at 9:09
  • Done. I have 500gb ssd only. Yes, linux is already installed there. I never heard about over provisioning thing, so I thought about decreasing parition size "live" with gparted. Aug 3, 2019 at 9:12
  • Also, what exactly are you trying to achieve? If your concern is write lifetime, note that using a smaller part of your SSD but exposing it to the same number of writes won't increase its lifetime.
    – marcelm
    Aug 4, 2019 at 10:01

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First, a SSD works totally differently compared with a HDD. On latter you actually assigned physical disk space (cylinders) to partitions. On SSDs partitions are purely logical, the space actually used for storage is distributed by the internal controller, which takes wear leveling into account, among others.

SSD manufacturers usually already overprovision their devices in the firmware. You may increase that by leaving some (logical) space unpartitioned, so the controller has more free capacity to work with. Or you can create an unused partition which you label accordingly to make clear what you intended.

But speaking from my (limited) knowledge, for the usual use cases (typical workstation use, not too write intensive) you could just assign all available space to partitions, and take care that the total space you use (over all partitions) doesn't exceed a certain percentage. So you make the best use of the capacity you paid for, without needing to repartition later (at least if your partition schema was sufficiently appropriate for your use), which would be a very write intensive process.

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    Also look into TRIM. The SSD will not know which space is no longer used by the filesystem unless it is told.
    – Wodin
    Aug 3, 2019 at 10:31
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    How to use Samsung Magician on Ubuntu: askubuntu.com/questions/537471/… However, applying fstrim -va once in a while is quite straightforward.
    – Murphy
    Aug 3, 2019 at 20:16
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    @PeterMortensen: It doesn't. This works because nothing ever writes to unpartitioned space, so it remains in unwritten state even without TRIM. (If a drive had previously been full, you need to TRIM or secure-erase / reset it before partitioning, though.) Aug 3, 2019 at 20:48
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    @Murphy: When you make a partition table with fdisk or whatever, you leave some of space not part of any partition. e.g. a trivial example: on a 256GB SSD, make a small boot partition, a 2GB swap partition, and a 200GB main partition, leaving about 54GB unused. You could later create another partition, or grow the last existing partition, into that space. Modern partitions are merely about subdividing the raw linear array of sectors/blocks that the raw block device presents. (e.g. /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1). All disk formatting of rotational media is left to the disk internals. Aug 3, 2019 at 21:22
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    @PeterCordes IDE used to use CHS (cylinder/head/sector); LBA didn't come around until substantially later. Aug 4, 2019 at 2:21

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