Anyone looked to see what space was available on the SSD with a new, out of the box system? I am trying to plan on living with the 128 SSD and wanted to find out how much I lose with Lion, any restore data, and iLife loaded.
I think it was ~120gb
Actually 120GB is the base unformatted capacity of the 128GB drive. I think OS X and the installed software use up about 14GB, so you'll have about 106GB for your other applications and data. The 256GB drive has a base unformatted capacity of about 250GB, so you would have 236GB free.
My 256GB has 251 avaliable![]()
The 256GB drive has a base unformatted capacity of about 250GB, so you would have 236GB free.
All modern SSDs set aside a certain amount of space called "overprovisioning". So even though there may technically be 256GB of flash memory, 5-7GB of it is inaccessible to the operating system. The SSD's controller moves data around in its spare time and uses that space when it needs to. The reason it does is that SSDs can only be written to a finite number of times (about 5000) before they wear out. If the controller detects that one SSD cell gets written to a lot, and another one doesn't get written to at all, it will move the data around so that the drive wears out evenly.
I'm grossly oversimplifying it, but that's what's going on. It helps ensure that the drive lasts as long as your computer.
Since the 256GB drive starts with 250GB, and OS X and the preinstalled applications take up 14GB, that means that out of the box the 256GB models have 236GB free.