I have a Samsung 850 EVO M.2 500GB SSD. I am running Linux Mint in a 100GB partition on the SSD. Aside from a 20GB swap space, the rest of the SSD is unpartitioned. GParted confirms the existence of a large unallocated space on the SSD. Is there a way to determine whether the SSD is using that space for OP and, if so, to see what difference OP makes if that partition size shrinks?

You should the complete SSD for Mint.

I don´t think, there is a way to check the overprovisioning.
It is done by the firmware of the SSD.

https://www.seagate.com/tech-insight...its-master-ti/

I'd think that if new it would have some set value. If it is older then some Samsung program is likely to display that value maybe??

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Thanks for that jefro, excellent.

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I have a few Samsumg 850s. From what I understand, you're just supposed to leave some free space (>=20%), and OP is automatic. If you shrink the free space, OP will use the smaller space. It uses whatever it can get.

I give you my point of view as a gentoo user with ~6 years SSD experience.

Never use any swap on a SSD. When your box has two harddrive bays use the second drive bay with an ordinary hdd and swap. Swap is only needed in my point of view for boxes with LEss than 4GiB of RAM or certain tasks. Just reconsider, think about if you really need swap. Most linux installation manuals are flawed in some aspects.

SAMSUNG hardware is problematic. I leave the statement as is.

Always have a backup. i do regularly backups. Drive a => drive b => drive c => drive d => drive a ... repeat. ... I have 4 ssds from different vendors and different production years

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check what samsung support says to this topic. as smart values are different for each manufacturer. I had a plextor drive which gave drive shit messages after 3 years with 5 years warranty. I sold it at 5 or 6 years age and never got reported back if the drive was dead. This was of course my main drive before i got the backup fetish.

I do regularly recreate my filesystem during the backup process. mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 is faster than wiping a file system. I am forced to copy over my data during the backup process. I do not do diff backups. I do full discs backups where I swap drives out during the process.

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I use 120GB SSD drives with 1 TB HDD. The 1 TB HDD is for junk and the gentoo dist files.
No swap. I did not used any swap with 4gib of ram, 8gib of RAM. Now I have 20gib of ram / i7-3610qm (with still the option to swap out the 2x2gib (very cheap 5-10 euro second hand) for 2x8gib modules)

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Only the manufacturer knows what the drive does. The issues are handled in the firmware and that is closed source bugged software. And it is never bad to have backups. SAMSUNG SSDs are problematic, firmware issues, I would not trust this brand. I also dealt with local SAMSUNG support in regards of my SAMSUNG android tablet. Very unfriendly

The flip side is that the Samsung SSD's are some of the most highly rated models available.

I still think that anyone using a SSD will have to understand their limits and risks in terms of ssd vs mechanical. What you gain in speed (and usually a lot) you can run into a number of risks.