NVMe Drives and FreeNAS

[SeaFox]

I recently completed a new build, and for my Jail drive I used an M.2 SSD I got a good deal on online. I was a little concerned about longevity of the particular drive since it's using QLC flash memory, but since it was much larger than the capacity I really needed, I figured I could just overprovision it to leave a big reserve for the wear leveling to use.

Anyway, I got it and installed it -- and found I was unable to adjust the usable size with camcontrol as I had planned. From what I understand now, it's because this is an NVMe drive and those cannot be controlled the way a SATA SSD can. The drive works fine, it simply does not appear at all in camcontrol.

Is there any way to overprovision an NVMe drive so the reserve capacity will be used for replacing worn cells?

Or am I just "overworrying" about this, given the intended use?

The drive is 1 GB in size. I'm just going to be using it for jail app storage, (my own files living back in the normal pool), so the majority of the data usage will probably be the Plex server's metadata horde and some apps' config files.

 

[pschatz100]

Or am I just "overworrying" about this, given the intended use?

Yes you are. An SSD will use any available space for wear leveling. All that overprovisioning does is reserve some space for this purpose. As long as you don't fill the drive to capacity then there will be space available for wear leveling. Most SSD's come from the factory set with 7% of their space allocated to overprovisioning. Therefore, if you don't use more than 80-85% of the available capacity of the SSD then you will have plenty of space for wear leveling.