Extreme Overprovisioning

[greenhawk]

It largely depends on how much data you tend to write and remove constantly and how full the drive will typically be. If most of the files are static you'll see no benefit at all. If the drive is filled at full speed, then emptied and that is done over and over then overprovisioning to 50% would show a more dramatic impact. Its really dependent on the usage pattern of the disk and on the nature of the data you store on it and for how long.

+1

Personally, given how a SSD works at the "low levels" (ie: below what the OS can see), you can get similar benifits to OP by self restricting data usage to your perfered level.

Most of the benifits from OP come from having extra space at the lower levels to allow the drive to work without needing to run TRIM or any form of garbage collection while you are accessing the drive. But this situation only comes about when you are creating and deleting large amounts of data. If it is a big concern for the intended user, they would be best served by buying a SSD that has excellent, consistant, writing speed for incompressable data.

But for a usage like the OP describes of non-changing data (99% sort of thing), any SSD will work, just get one that has a good mix between read speed and IO per second.

Given everything involved with SSD's, OP is not something the average user cares about as a big issue. For most SSD buyers, the issue is cost. Giving up 1/2 the drive's space just to get a few percent increase (which might be noticable in a bentch mark) is not exactly likly.

If performance was critical, then better off looking at getting 2 SSD's and running RAID 0 on them as that will give a higher performance increase than OP.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

Does marking large portions of an SSD as unpartitioned (unusable space) affect Wear Leveling?

 

[sm625]

OP only helps if you are dirtying all your pages faster than garbage collection / TRIM can recover them. A page is made dirty every time you update a file and then the file is written to a new location on the disk so it can be combined with other writes so it doesnt waste write cycles. So every time you save a simple text file it might write that new data to a new page, each time it does it will mark the page that contains the old data for garbage collection. Your drive has thousands and thousands of these pages so under normal usage they will never all get dirty. But if they did, somehow, then the garbage collection would have to be done before any more data could be written, causing a possible stutter. But you gotta do some serious writing to that drive for it to ever happen. If you have OP, those spare pages can be used in the event all your pages become dirty. But like everyone's been saying, all your pages are never going to all be dirty, so your OP is never going to get used.

 

[Psyside]

OP vs leaving free space? is it exactly the same?