Over-provisioning information for Intel® NAND SSDs
Unable to determine over-provisioning in Intel® NAND drives.
Over-provisioning an SSD means to make more of the SSD's capacity available to the controller than what was initially designed in. This technique increases SSD endurance by allowing extra buffer space for the flash controller to manage incoming data.
Each SSD has factory over-provisioned area . This provides an SSD controller with the spare capacity needed to move the data around when programming or erasing partially invalid pages or blocks. This area is not addressable by the host/user and may vary in size depending on SSD model and capacity.
Sacrificing user-addressable capacity by manually increasing the effective SSD's spare area allocation will result in endurance gains due to write amplification factor (WAF) decrease.
To learn more about over-provisioning in Intel® NAND SSDs, refer to the white paper Over-Provisioning NAND-Based Intel® SSDs for Better Endurance.
