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Back in August of last year, Kent Smith delivered an excellent lecture on over provisioning at the Flash Memory Summit, held in San Jose, California, and we published a quick summary in result.
We find that consumers still don’t quite understand over provisioning and this is seen, many times, through the amount of e-mails received asking us to explain why their SSD doesn’t have the advertised capacity available to them when they format the drive.
Recently, Kent has written another article at the EDN Network entitled, ‘Understanding SSD Over Provisioning‘ that we believe would be a valuable read, not only for the potential new SSD user but also, for the many that could use a bit clearer understanding of over provisioning. From the article…
“The over-provisioned capacity of NAND flash memory creates the space the flash storage processor needs to manage the flash memory more intelligently and effectively. As shown by these test results, higher percentages of over-provisioning improve both write performance and write amplification. Higher percentages of over-provisioning can also improve the endurance of flash memory and enable more robust forms of data protection beyond basic error correction.”
The “full article” link does not work.
Excellent four page article on the use of overprovisioning and the Trim command.