Over-Provisioning (short stroking) SSD

[riptideMBP]

I just heard about this form of "short stroking for SSDs" and I was considering doing it as it is supposed to increase endurance and performance. Has anyone done this with an intel SSD as outlined here, or is there possibly a different procedure to follow for OSX?

 

[Weaselboy]

I don't believe this is necessary on newer drives. Most 120GB drives for example, actually have 128GB of space and 8GB is set aside for the over provisioning described in your link.

 

[ChazB]

I don't believe this is necessary on newer drives. Most 120GB drives for example, actually have 128GB of space and 8GB is set aside for the over provisioning described in your link.

I'm pretty sure you're right. Anything with a SanForce chipset should be doing this automatically IIRC. That's the reason why their drives are 120GB/240GB/480GB instead of 128GB/256GB/512GB. The "missing" space is used for garbage collecion which includes over-provisioning. Again; this is all contingent on my memory of everything I've read on SSDs over the past week being solid.

 

[riptideMBP]

I definitely get what you two are saying, but the document from intel suggests you can get improved performance/reliability by reserving even more space for the SSDs operations (I'm only using about a third of my space), so I was curious if anyone here had gotten this to work

 

[iMacDragon]

I definitely get what you two are saying, but the document from intel suggests you can get improved performance/reliability by reserving even more space for the SSDs operations (I'm only using about a third of my space), so I was curious if anyone here had gotten this to work

I believe this can only be done properly at the firmware level, nothing the user has control over. Basically, enterprise drives tend to have a much bigger allocation.

Though, if you only create a partition that is 2/3 of the drive, an intelligent controller should end up using the rest of the cells for wear levelling anyway, and thus possible end up with a longer life.