Q about A-Data SandForce Gen2 SSDs, lack of RAISE and OP?

[VirtualLarry]

It seems that in order to enhance their marketability, A-Data has chosen to use SF firmware in their drives, that doesn't feature RAISE, and lacks the 7% over-provisioning found in other SF SSDs.

Is this a serious detriment to the longevity of the drives?

A second question, since SF drives utilize compression, they tend not to like software-based FDE that well. I've heard that SF drives can get "painted into a corner" by filling them with incompressable data.

If A-Data drives lack the 7% OP, wouldn't that put them even more at risk from panic-locking, due to lack of free space when using FDE?

 

[Hellhammer]

All SSDs have at least ~7% of NAND dedicated for OP thanks to Gibibyte to Gigabyte translation. In other words, a 256GB SSD actually has 256GiB (274.9GB) of NAND but only 256GB is visible to the end-user.

The ADATA SSDs (and some others too) have exactly the same amount of OP as every other SandForce-based SSD but have RAISE disabled. RAISE is not added OP, it's parity to protect data loss in case of NAND failure.

All in all, SF SSDs with RAISE disabled should perform about the same (there may be small differences but we are looking at ~5%) since RAISE is not related to performance in anyway.

 

[VirtualLarry]

http://www.eteknix.com/sandforce-over-provisioning-eliminated/

Just curious, because there are articles and reviews suggesting that SF SSDs used to have 14% OP, 7% because of the Gibi/Giga issues, and 7% on top of that.