Those graphs with the pretty colors on page 2 of that article show the performance decrease if you fill up the drive, yes.
I think it's dumb to over-provision an SSD, unless it's non-Intel and non-Sandforce. Both the Intel and the SF controllers use partitioned spare area the same as unpartitioned spare area. So you gain nothing by leaving more spare area other than forcing yourself to never fill up the drive.
TRIM works all the time, not just once you've written to the entire disk. It allows the drive to reclaim deleted sectors, so it always has the full free area to use as free area. Without TRIM the deleted sectors are off limits until something else comes along and tells the SSD "hey, you can use that sector".
You're going to have to watch how much you fill up any drive, if you're using it as your boot drive. This is especially true for SSDs but it's important to note that it's a consideration for *any* drive.
The manufacturers have worked out their numbers and they have a certain amount of the drive saved as spare area. You're safe filling your drive up, if you can live with the performance hit -- it's not that big of an impact. It's not like it reduces your SSD to the performance of a spindle drive or something. You still will have a fast SSD. Just not a smokin' fast SSD.
I love this thing. ITS FAST!
Original Formatted size: 149GB
Provisioned size: 134.7GB
I can live with that. On successive formats I will try filling up the drive without extra provisioning and see myself exactly how much performance decreases. Ona side note, I got this drive from fleabay as mentioned. It was listed as BNIB with intel warranty. Before I bought the drive I checked intel's warranty info, and nowhere did it say that it had to be bought from an authorized reseller, though that is the standard practice AFAIK *now* except from WD/Seagate ect.
The reason I'm kinda upset is that though the seller claimed warranty and BNIB, the thing came in a dinged retail box wrapped in fucking homestyle shrink wrap, which kinda got me worried, so I had a live chat w/ intel and it turns out they wont warranty the drive. So instead of filing a claim with ebay to get my money back, (On the off chance that the seller has removed the money from his PP account, and ebay will give me some kinda BS Gift certificate to use on their site as I've heard them due to other people if the transaction does not end well) I bought a 3 year warranty from square trade. Anyone have any experience with them? The SSD so far is working great, but in case it dies, I hope they will replace it instead of just refunding my warranty purchase money and saying that it they wont honor it. I guess my next step would be to google Squaretrade feedback or something of that nature, but I was wondering if any of you AT guys had any personal experiences to share w/ me. Sorry for the thread hijack. As far as SSD recommendations go, I was looking at the Corsair Force 180GB, It also has a three year warranty and is pretty new, probably faster than my intel drive, but all I could find in stock were the overpriced 240GB drives.
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