Storage became extremely slow

[HoneyBadger]

As for terminology, coming from an ISP and hosting environment overprovisioning to me means selling more than you actually have, like in bandwidth, CPU cores, memory

That would be "oversubscribing" - and yes, that's definitely something that ISPs do a lot of. ;)

For the phrasing on SSDs I believe it's a matter of perspective and the frame of reference - the manufacturer overprovisions their SSDs by adding extra NAND (applying more than necessary). We as end-users underprovision by limiting addressable space (using less than provided) with the central frame of reference in both cases being the factory-usable space out of the box.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I have been looking for ways to do a secure erase on my Optane SSD to start anew with a smaller partition, but did not find anything useful.

Try the "Intel Memory and Storage Tool" here:

Intel® Memory and Storage Tool (GUI)

The Intel® Memory and Storage Tool (Intel® MAS) is a drive management tool for Intel® SSDs and Intel® Optane™ Memory devices, supported on Windows*.

downloadcenter.intel.com

I've linked to the Windows GUI version, but there's also a CLI variant in the same article. Says it works on Linux/ESXi but I don't see FreeBSD binaries.

I also don't believe that Optane specifically supports the set_max_address command like the other DC series drives, so you'll have to manually create the smaller partition.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Do I really need to do a secure erase? Or would dd if=/dev/zero ... followed by the TRIM auto-magic do the trick, too?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Do I really need to do a secure erase? Or would dd if=/dev/zero ... followed by the TRIM auto-magic do the trick, too?

A dd zero pass on SSDs is actually the worst thing possible for them, since the "empty" state of a cell is actually closer to a binary 1. Unfortunately there's no /dev/one device. ;)

Secure erase is the right approach here; on SSDs, this sends a TRIM to all cells. ZFS tunables also default to having vfs.zfs.vdev.trim_on_init set, which means that deleting all partitions and recreating a new smaller one will have the same effect (over time, as TRIM catches up) - but I'd suggest the secure-erase to be 100% certain that the device is clean.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Meaning I will have to boot Linux. As if the Intel and Samsung firmware update ISOs weren't enough trouble and downtime, already.
Thanks.

 

[morganL]

I have been looking for ways to do a secure erase on my Optane SSD to start anew with a smaller partition, but did not find anything useful. I know the reasoning you laid out, but hopefully I am not the only one reading it. Thanks for the work!

As for terminology, coming from an ISP and hosting environment overprovisioning to me means selling more than you actually have, like in bandwidth, CPU cores, memory, ... Customers tend to not all request the maximum amount provisioned to them at the same time. Similarly in the data centre, 2x 10G LACP uplink for 48x 1G top of rack ports is plenty. Any one of those servers hardly ever uses even half of that 1G. That's what I would call overprovisioning. The terminology used here for SSDs always sounds the wrong way round for me. But I will get used to applying whatever is the standard and other folks understand.

I come from both ISP networking and flash backgrounds myself...and agree that its a little confusing to use the same word. In this case you are "over provisioning" the amount of spare capacity on the drive. It helps sustained (especially random) write performance and increases drive endurance by reducing the erase cycles.

Optane should not need overprovisioning. NVMe drives may benefit, but it's not a command set that has been implemented.