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Having read a number of SSD reviews, in particular, of those made by Crucial (a.k.a Micron), I've come to the conclusion that partitioning an SSD is going to make it slower. Here is the logic:
Those reviews explained that (at least the Crucial SSD's based on Marvel controllers) are essentially a RAID array of memory chips soldered to the board, invisible to the end-user as separate entities. I recall one or more of the reviews explicitly stated that the smaller capacity drive sequential access speeds were lacking because it had only half the number of chips of the larger drive. The slowdown was almost linear according to their testing. Thus, I conclude that when I partition such a drive, only a part of the chips are going to be in the partition, thus I'm going to suffer from the said linear slowdown.
Is the above true for Marvell based Crucials? For other drives such as Samsung-controller based, Sandforce-based, others? I'm particularly interested in the Crucial drives, them being the best bang for the buck right now. I'd be happy to also RAID a couple of those on an X79, but totally unsure about partitioning that either. However, that would be a separate question, and not a part of this one, so I'd like to first firgure out partitioning a single SSD drive.
2Considering the drives already use whatever cells they desire for whatever address and there is no 1:1 mapping, the partitions can reside anywhere in the chips. – Sami Kuhmonen – 2016-03-13T17:56:01.973
I don't think partitioning make any difference to speed in an SSD drive, as @SamiKuhmonen mentioned, there is no 1:1 mapping like in a spinning drive (normally), the drive will utilize the cells where if it wishes... How you partition it is not relevant. I have several SSD drives, benchmarking is pretty consistent whether it is one large volume or multiple smaller volumes. – acejavelin – 2016-03-13T18:15:20.707
Since IDE, we should not even be concerned with internal strategies. The only issue with partitioning to affect performance in any way is alignment of the boundaries to geometry favored by the manufacturer. (Cylinder preferably, even though this is abstracted). – mckenzm – 2016-04-02T21:28:38.207