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Overprovisioning a good idea for reliability?

Z

ZodaEX

Supreme [H]ardness
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Sep 17, 2004
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So I got to thinking about how most SSD manufacturers over provision their drives in order to have spare cells/sectors in the event that some of the nand wears out. How come the Crucial M4 apparently has such high reliability somehow with no overprovisioning, yet OCZ with their Vertex drives touts the feature of 17% overprovisioning for the sake of reliability but yet they seem to have many more issues. Is overprovisioning something to look for in to an SSD or it is just marketing fluff?
 
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for the sake of reliability but yet they seem to have many more issues.
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I have yet to see an issue posted on this forum that was related to flash wearing out. The failures I see seem to be related to firmware bugs or some type of controller failure.
 
The benefit to overprovisioning is not really reliability/lifetime, it is that it helps the drive with garbage collection which keeps performance from tanking after heavy use. The whole write lifetime issue was completely overblown initially. My guess is that OCZ uses such high overprovisioning because the Sandforce controllers are not aggressive with garbage collection.
 
ZodaEX said:
So I got to thinking about how most SSD manufacturers over provision their drives in order to have spare cells/sectors in the event that some of the nand wears out. How come the Crucial M4 apparently has such high reliability somehow with no overprovisioning, yet OCZ with their Vertex drives touts the feature of 17% overprovisioning for the sake of reliability but yet they seem to have many more issues. Is overprovisioning something to look for in to an SSD or it is just marketing fluff?
Click to expand...

I have yet to see an SSD "wear out". I have seen them die like any other hard drive, but in ways which usually manifest themselves as bricked drives and smoked drives. I haven't seen one where I can point my finger and say worn out. In any case, the Vertex (and other 2 and 3 series drives) had firmware and driver problems related to the controller, not the flash cells themselves, and for me at least with the V3 max iops firmware 2.15 has fixed all outstanding issues.
 
The first SSDs, despite being based on SLC NAND, started shrinking after some use, for a lack of a decent wear leveling algorithm.
 
Aesma said:
The first SSDs, despite being based on SLC NAND, started shrinking after some use, for a lack of a decent wear leveling algorithm.
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So that's what happens when they use up nand with no over-provision, they shrink? Interesting.
 
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