IBM filed a patent that describes an SSD that can be adjusted to its capacity as well as drive life.
The basic idea is that users can either choose to leverage the full capacity of the SSD or reduce the size and reserve some of the memory cells as a safety net when other memory cells fail. In effect, less capacity can provide a longer drive life.
IBM envisions that users can configure the desired drive life in combination with a minimum storage capacity, which will be done via the firmware of the SSD: "Based on the user configuration and the utilization, a portion of the SSD memory devices is allocated as available memory, and another portion of the SSD memory devices is reserved as overprovisioned memory, to be used as fallback when available memory devices reach their PE wear out threshold," the patent states.
