However, there already is a certain amount of free space allocated for this task. On the Intel drives, it's the difference between 80GiB and 80GB; the latter is the maximum addressable by the OS, the former is the actual capacity of the flash chips. Flash chips always have a power-of-2 capacity, and there are 5, 10 or 20 chips in the various intel drives.
The limitation back then was the controller. Intel figured out how to do it properly before anyone else. I still have an 80 GB X25-M G2 as well (read latency 65 µs [1]).
Correction: I'd forgotten the details. Looks like I aimed for 256k, and it is this size that works well. I did consider filesystem performance when I chose the size, intending flat file blob storage here.
Huh, that is almost as ridiculous as using nameplate disk capacity units that sound the same, but are are different than the ones used and reported by the operating system.
In your first comment you seemed to be talking right by the person, but I guess not.
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