Unexpected error when over provisioning in Storage Executive

If you receive an error message when attempting to enable Over-Provisioning with the Storage Executive® software, there are a couple of things to check to make sure your drive is ready for this feature to be enabled. 

To turn on Over-Provisioning, you will need to have a partition with a drive letter listed at the end of the SSD (in Disk Management, the Over-Provisioning partition must be the partition furthest to the right of the drive). This partition must have free space at least equal to the size of the intended Over-Provisioning.

If you do not have an Over-Provisioning capable partition configured, you will need to shrink your primary partition down slightly, creating an amount of unallocated space equal to the amount you want for Over-Provisioning.

  1. Open Disk Management. This is most easily done using the shortcut Windows Key+X, then selecting "Disk Management" from the context menu.
  2. Right-click the partition to be reduced, and select "Shrink Volume."
  3. Enter the amount of space to shrink in Megabytes, then click "Shrink."

Then simply leave this space as unallocated to receive the same benefits of Over Provisioning while it is in place, and if the space is no longer desired, just repeat the above but using "Extend Volume" to extend the partition so that it is added back onto your partition for use by other applications.  Disk Management may not be able to achieve this if you are actively booted to the same drive that you are attempting to change, at which point you may need to use a third-party partition management program.  These tools will typically allow you to make changes to the partitions even when Windows is not able to.  A quick search online for terms like "free partition assistant program" will find you many different resources to accomplish this.  

Once you have the Over-Provisioning partition set up, you will be able to configure Over-Provisioning in the Storage Executive software. 

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