how can I increase endurance of X25-M by slightly lowering it's capacity?

[idata]

On another forum (http://c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5993-Somewhat-stable-Solid-State.html http://c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5993-Somewhat-stable-Solid-State.html) I've read this:

"Intel says that you can increase endurance of the X25-M by 3.5X by lowering its capacity slightly".

Anyone knows if it's really the case and how exactly it's done?

Thanks.

[idata]

Maybe. I think it is likely that there could be a background thread running on the SSD controller which looks for blocks where all clusters are invalid (either due to TRIM or having the logical clusters overwritten), and erases them before they are needed again, but TRIM would return before this thread does the erase.

This is just speculation on my part, but intuitively it makes sense something like this would be done to reduce write performance degradation.

[PCoup1]

ive just watched that intel presentation, but have absolutely no idea how to increase my spare area.

would anybody care to explain?

[idata]

Use Secure Erase to wipe the drive to a factory-fresh condition, then make a partition smaller than the max size of the drive. The unpartitioned clean space will be automatically added to the spare area. Simply resizing your partition will not clean those freed blocks, so they will not be added to the spare space.

[PCoup1]

Invisibill, thanks for your reply, however just to be totally clear:

I have a new G2 drive sitting unopened in its anti static bag waiting for the new firmware. Once I've flashed it with the new firmware, boot into W7 setup and arrive at the partition screen. Normally at this point I would make a 50GB partition and use this as my D drive, and the remaining 20GB as my C partition. Windows also makes a 100MB system partition for that bitlocker crap. So, do I need to make 3 partitions? Make a 40GB (for D), a 20GB (for C), and a 10GB for spare area, and then only format C and D and leave the 10GB untouched? I know my figures don't add up to 80GB but theyre going to be roughly whats actually availabile on the drive when I arrive at that screen.

[idata]

No, don't make a 10GB partition. Just leave 10GB of space unallocated on the drive. http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/installation-setup/10118d1241832267-unalocated-disk-space-aft... http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/installation-setup/10118d1241832267-unalocated-disk-space-aft... is an example of having some space unallocated (just a random pic I found).