The Impact of Spare Area on SandForce, More Capacity At No Performance Loss?

By moving to 13% over provisioning you drop the cost per usable GB to roughly 83% of what it is on current SF-1200 drives at virtually no impact to performance in typical workloads. It’s still not as cheap as an X25-M in terms of dollars per GB, but you are getting better performance. And the best part? It doesn’t even require a different chip - only different firmware. If they choose to, existing SF-1200 drive manufacturers could load this firmware on their drives and give their customers more user capacity up front. It could even be a user configurable option if a manufacturer wanted to enable it. Unfortunately there's no guarantee that we'll see this made available at no extra charge. Vendors could be particularly evil and charge more for a simple change in the amount of spare area you get on a drive. I'd highly recommend against it though.