Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Most drives don't have any special functionality for adjusting overprovisioning. You just don't touch a large chunk of the LBA space and you get more or less the same effect. Leaving part of the drive unpartitioned, or creating a partition but not putting a filesystem in it will accomplish that purpose.

Drive vendors can tweak this in firmware to make the drive appear to have lower accessible capacity (or higher, for fraudulent drives). But as I've said several times, doing so to make a 10TB product would not make sense. The drives that expose a 12.8TB usable capacity from 16TB of flash already have far more overprovisioning than almost anybody needs. Further reducing that to 10TB would be throwing away capacity for little or no performance gain and a useless improvement to write endurance. It's not a product any rational, non-fraudulent vendor would create, because there's no demand for such a strange configuration. The fact that it's theoretically possible to create such a product does not actually make a 10TB SSD less suspicious.

(Side note: you don't have to tell me about what Anandtech tested with SSDs. Been there, done that.)



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: