Patent attributes
The over-provisioning (OP) of a physical storage device (PSD) may be increased, and the useful life of the PSD increased, by converting uncompressed data stored on the PSD to compressed data. It may be determined that increasing the useful life of the PSD, and the data reduction resulting from the compression, outweigh the benefit of faster I/O response times if the data remains uncompressed. A first portion of the PSD may be initially reserved for compression. A second portion of the PSD may store compressed data. It may be determined whether it is desirable to increase the OP of the PSD to thereby reduce the effective write rate on the PSD. If compression is determined to be desirable, the dynamic portion may be compressed, thereby reducing the amount of storage space consumed by the data, and freeing up storage space that can be used by the PSD for OP.
