LSI-SandForce Releases Code to SSD Manufacturers That Removes Over-provisioning
 

To anyone who's familiar with SSDs, "SandForce" is equally familiar, as it makes the brains of some of the fastest client SSDs in the business. Buyers have also come to know of SandForce-driven SSDs as being characterized by unique capacity amounts caused by allocating a certain amount of the physical NAND flash capacity for some special low-level tasks by the controller, resulting in capacities such as 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB, for drives with physical NAND flash capacities of 64, 128, and 256 GB, respectively. This allocation is called "over-provisioning". An impression was built that this ~7% loss in capacity is some sort of a trade-off for higher performance. It appears like that's not quite the case.

http://www.techpowerup.com/161285/LS...visioning.html