The future of SSD performance consistency (OP etc)

[CakeMonster]

Will/should there be more overprovisioning on SSDs? I thought of this because the AT review of the new OCZ drive praised the 12% OP.

With regards to consumer expectations, should there be more overprovisioning to give better performance to (clueless) consumers who tend to fill up their drives? Or do you think this will become the standard? Or are we better off having OSes managing free space and taking care of the problem?

I'm just wondering because it seems the performance penalty for a full or near full disk is much higher with SSDs than mechanical drives, and as they become more common, more people with suffer from it.

 

[john3850]

One of the first things I learned abut computers was to always have spare hd space.
Try to defrag a 95% full hard drive and see if it will defrag correctly.
Most spindle drives will have so many fragments by the time there full they become slow and almost unusable.
If you want to fill up a ssd just leave some op space.

 

[Cerb]

SSDs totally full of random data are managing 1K+ IOPS, some 5K+, and one or two 10K+.

Older SSDs could be brought to speeds slower than an HDD. Now that's not the case, anymore. Older SSDs could be brought to low speeds with very high write amplification, too. That's pretty much a non-concern.

Greater OP from the factory can help performance, but as long as the drives work well with TRIM, the lower OP gives you more flexibility, as all you have to do is delete some junk and wait a bit, to speed it back up again while with higher OP, you just run out of space.

Neither is perfect, but neither is bad. If you're going to fill it up, you needed a bigger one to keep up performance. But, that's been the case with every storage medium I can recall, except for tape, floppies, and optical discs.

 

[razel]

The situation Anand is testing is FAR beyond what a single average Joe will EVER encounter. Overprovisioning is something you do not have to worry about, just something you end up paying for to have more of in the 'PRO' products that are used in server environments.