All worthy solid state drives has its share of memory cells that is locked away from the user. These cells are used to maintain performance and reliability even when the memory cells are starting to fill up. SandForce has one of the most popular memory controllers today and it has issued a new firmware that reduce the amount of locked memory cells from 28% to only 13%.
Hopefully this will enable better GB/dollar ratio, but chanes are performance will suffer. At Anandtech they have tested an Agility 2 drive with SandForce’s new firmware and the performance doesn’t seem to suffer than much, while the 128GB model can now store 111.8GB instead of 93.1GB.
An interesting change, but it will be up to the individual SSD makers to decide which firmware to use, maximal theoretic performance or higher actual storage capacity.
