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Re:SSD Prices in a Free Fall by hoprocker on Monday June 22, 2015 @05:02PM (#9761172)
Does the SSD actually use this unformatted space? I know that SSDs from the factory have a lower available space than their nominal space, to account for the eventual dimishing quanitty of functional floating gate transistors (ie 240GB is made available in a 256GB drive), and that OSes usually recommend keeping about 10% of the formatted drive free (for paging iirc). Didn't know that about unformatted space.
Re:SSD Prices in a Free Fall by wmf on Monday June 22, 2015 @05:26PM (#9761318)
All clean pages (from overprovisioning, unformatted space, and trimmed space) should be treated the same by SSDs. In particular, Intel documents that leaving unformatted space will increase performance on their SSDs.
Re:SSD Prices in a Free Fall by fencepost on Monday June 22, 2015 @08:50PM (#9762084)
I may be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that on SSDs the wear leveling is done over the entire flash capacity. the details of where data is stored are an abstraction layer on top of that unlike on a spinning metal hard disk where specific regions of the drive are allocated to particular partitions
Re:SSD Prices in a Free Fall by wtallis on Monday June 22, 2015 @10:19PM (#9762297)
Wear leveling is done in the layer that translates between LBAs and actual physical chip numbers and addresses. Drive partitions are well above all of that in the abstraction stack, and partition tables are totally beyond the scope of a drive's concern (even for spinning rust drives). These days it is even common for a drive to have two different partition tables in two different formats with different partitions listed. Bootloaders and operating systems are the only things that should care about partitions.