On 29/08/2017 at 15:20, Simon Hobson wrote: > Alessandro Selli <alessandroselli@???> wrote:
>
>>> I figure that over sizing the
>>> drive will help with wear leveling. I'm not sure if that is a valid
>>> assumption, however.
>>
>> I am convinced it is. The more cells to pseudo-randomically spread writes
>> to, the lower the number of write operations that are performed on each one
>> of them.
>
> Provided that the drive knows the block is "unused" - which requires that the OS support TRIM. Without TRIM, when a block changes from in-use to free, the drive will still see it as "a block with data in it" - and thus it cannot erase it and put it in it's free pool.
Wear-levelling today is handled by the firmware transparently to the OS.
Trimming only affect the filesystem's block-allocator algorithm, not
wear-levelling.