1 Topic by roadrun777

  • roadrun777
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  • Registered: 2023-06-29
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Topic: Just a warning for NVME users

I had a little space left over from creating an extra partition, it was only like 4gb, and it was on an NVME drive, so I thought I would resize the partition and take up the extra gigs of space, and that was a mistake.
I should have read and thought this through.
These utilities at the heart of Gparted are from the disk and sector era, and you might know where this is going.
To expand my partition an extra 4gb it wrote exactly the same amount of the size of the disk to the NVME.

So I just used up 2% of my drives life to get back an extra 4gb.

The way I should have done this was to create a sector copy image and dump that on another drive (as I was only using 200gb of space at the time), deleted the partition, then recreated it, but I realized my mistake 10 minutes in and I knew. I had that sinking feeling watching the write lite stay bright for 5 mins solid. I knew I had chosen unwisely.

But because I hadn't made a backup of the data yet I couldn't abort, so I let it write sector to sector (even empty space) to my NVME drive and it just chewed right through it.

If I could request anything, it would be that you put a warning on the "resize" partition for SSD and NVME drives telling people that there may be a more efficient and less destructive way to resize?

Anyway, hope this helps someone.

2 Reply by mfleetwo

  • mfleetwo
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Re: Just a warning for NVME users

For GParted to have re-written all the sectors in the partition, the start of the partition must have been moved.  This is required because file systems store all there data at sector offset from the start of the partition.  (Ext2/3/4 has a file system specific command available which reduces this to only needing to move used sectors in the file system, rather than all sectors in the partition).

A resize only operation, moving the end of the partition, requires writing much less data to the drive.

I just looked at the first NVME drive in a google shop search.
https://business.currys.co.uk/catalogue … e/P275447P
It's size is 256G and lifetime write is 128T, so lifetime writes is 512 x capacity.

So you say writing to your whole NVME drive once represents 2% of the lifetime of writes.  So it lifetime writes is only 50 x capacity.  That seems very low.


Recommendations:
1. Always have tested backups, otherwise you are saying you don't care if you loose the data.
2. Shrink a partition to having about 10% free space before moving the start.  Apply the operation.  Then move the start of the partition.
   Grow the partition to the needed size.
   This way you minimise the time taken by minimising the sectors written to the drive and maximise the life of flash based storage.