Do any SATA SSDs allow you to massively over-provision them or otherwise limit their space on a hardware level?

[Cyber Akuma]

I have some older devices that had strange limits to how large a drive they could handle. One of them for example tops out at 1.5TB, going higher would cause issues. Are there any SSDs that allow me to massively over-provision them or otherwise from a bios/hardware level limit their available space so I can make a 2TB drive look like a 1.5TB drive to the system?

 

[UhClem]

HPA - Host Protected Area

 

[d3athf1sh]

I have some older devices that had strange limits to how large a drive they could handle. One of them for example tops out at 1.5TB, going higher would cause issues. Are there any SSDs that allow me to massively over-provision them or otherwise from a bios/hardware level limit their available space so I can make a 2TB drive look like a 1.5TB drive to the system?

i would think you could just format it to whatever size you wanted. if you had to do it in the pc first then move it to your external enclosure if thats what you are working with?

 

[Nenu]

As d3athf1sh said, take a larger drive and format it to 1.5GB.
The unused space will be internally used by the drive for wear levelling.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

Just partitioning it would not work, some of the systems, like consoles, would just take the entire drive and re-partition/format it how they want.

 

[Nenu]

Just partitioning it would not work, some of the systems, like consoles, would just take the entire drive and re-partition/format it how they want.

They cant address larger than their capability, which was the reason for my suggestion.
See post 1 where you said they have limits on size they can use.

 

[Cyber Akuma]

They cant address larger than their capability, which was the reason for my suggestion.
See post 1 where you said they have limits on size they can use.

From my understanding they can see and will attempt to format a 2TB drive, but have issues if it's larger than 1.5TB, they were never intended for drives that large.

 

[Nenu]

From my understanding they can see and will attempt to format a 2TB drive, but have issues if it's larger than 1.5TB, they were never intended for drives that large.

If thats the case, the answer is no.
You could always find out, test with a larger drive.

 

[likeman]

https://www.google.com/search?q=use+HPA+SSD+to+limit+size

most disks have ATA option to set max capacity (the samsung ssd dc toolkit can do this for any ssd that supports it and intel if you have an intel ssd)

only do this on an uninitialized disk , if the ssd has had data on it i would recommend formatting it and run a defrag optimize so it Zeros out the ssd, then use diskpart, select disk and clean to bring it into an uninitialized state (or if you can work out how to do it use secure erase command as that will reset the drive to New state and all NAND space will be zeroed out, samsung DC toolkit can do this where supported)

the reason to do this is so the 500GB of empty space is available for overprovisioning (assuming setting 2TB SSD to 1.4TB)