The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Understanding Spare Area (or Why My 80GB Drive Appears as 74.5GB)
Intel's 80GB X25-M has 80GB of NAND flash on it. That's 85,899,345,920 bytes or 80 x 1024^3 bytes (1024 bytes in a kilobyte x 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte x 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte x 80 gigabytes).
Hard drive makers however assume that 80GB means 80,000,000,000 bytes, since they use the definition of 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. SSD vendors thus use the same definition. Now 80,000,000,000 bytes actually equals 74.5GB, so that's all the space you get to use on the drive.
How much space is there really on the drive? 80GB. How much space does Windows let you use? 74.5GB. What happens to the remaining 5.5GB? It's used by the drive's controller as spare area.
Intel’s controller is dynamic, it uses the entire drive as spare area until you’ve written every LBA once. Then it relies on the remaining 7.5% of non-user-space as its scratch pad. That’s why its new, out of box, performance is so good.
Other controllers may not be quite as dynamic, but they may also take a smaller performance hit when fully used. Why would Intel work so hard to make its out of box performance so high, even when it’ll be short lived? Because of TRIM.
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Bonesdad - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Been over a year since this article was published...still very relevant. Any plans to update it with the latest products/drivers/firmware? There have been some significant updates, and it would be good to at least have updated comparisons.Well done, more more more!
hescominsoon - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link
Excellent article but you left out sandforce. I'm curious if this was an oversight or a purposeful moission.PHT - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
This article is fantastic, the best I ever read about SSD.Any follow up with new SATA III drives and new controllers like SandForce, new Indilinx etc.?
I will be glad to see it.
My Best
Zygmunt
lucasgonz - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link
Hello everyone.This post is quite old but I hope someone can answer.
I am concerned about the life of my ssd (sandisk extreme 240). I performed partitions ignoring the issue of the level of wear and partitions. I have it for one year ago with a 30gb partition and one with 200GB. I wanted to use large drive for data but I did not have time for that and just use the first 30gb partition . My question is if the ssd may be damaged by using only a little segment. DiskInfo shows 10tb reading 18 tb and writing.
sorry my poor English.
Thanks for any help.
Ojaswin Singh - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
Hey,This is the most informative article i have ever read.Can You Please clear Out Some Of my Doubts:-1.Does Playing Video Games or Running Programs add to Writing on the SSD
2.Is 1 Write Cycle=Filling 120GB of SSD once
3.I really write on my HDD a lot(Seriusly a Lot) So how much life cycle can i expect from Samsung 840 SSD(Neither Pro nor EVO) I mean for how much time can i expect it to be writable
Please Help me cause i want the speeds of SSD but i want it to last for me too
Thanks,
Ojaswin