News LSI boosts SSD capacities with over-provisioning change

LSI's SandForce controllers can now use 'zero per cent' over-provisioning, boosting capacities by around seven per cent.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/02/27/lsi-boosts-ssd-capacities/1

 

This seems a bit silly, really. When someone buys a SSD, they do it for the performance, not the capacity, so i'd be surprised if anyone was gonna sacrifice that extra zoom for a couple of GB when they most likely have a Hard Disk anyway.

 

Well if you have a 60 GB SSD then 4 extra GB could matter. That amount of extra storage is good enough for more than a few programs.
Personally I consider it a good trade off.

 

If the performance hit is barely noticable, then I'd want the extra capacity even at the expense of longevity. I am not likely to end up running in to NAND flash longevity issues. Heck, I have a 60GB Vertex as my boot disk (granted my page file is on my 500GB 7200rpm disk) and I think I am around 85-90% life left on the disk the last time I checked a few months ago. That is with about 3 years of use out of the thing as of June.

 

I'm with Alialias. I'll only buy one of the 'new' drives if there is a way/utility/driver that I can use that would reinstate the over-provisioning. The over-provisioning + a DRAM cache would just be an extra speedy bonus to me as I'd still use a small HDD for pagefile and mass storage.

 

Yup, just leave some of the SSD unformatted. Personally, I leave about 28% unformatted (including the provisioned space).

 

I'm still holding off 'till the price comes down and the technology settles a bit more... Would be miffed if I had to re-format my hard drive every month when new software comes out.