Wow, I can't believe how much an SSD has degraded after 2 years.

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Wiseguy2001

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I just ordered a new SSD (a Vertex4), as they're pretty cheap now and the newer drives are virtually running at the wire speed of SATA3.

Just for kicks I benchmarked my existing 240gb Vertex 2 which I brought two years ago (to get a before and after). I'm pretty surprised by how much slower it has got over time (the sequential speeds have dropped massively).
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Just thought I'd share. Hopefully formatting will fix this, otherwise it isn't much better than spindles. Can't wait for the new drive!
 
Guess what? The write speed degradation is especially steep since that Vertex 2 is based on an older Sandforce controller to begin with.
 
I believe the OCZ toolbox let's you do a wipe to restore performance to the drive, just make sure you're all set up on your new Vertex 4 first, haha.
 
That's good, I was hoping I'd be able to restore the performance. I'm Planning on putting the V2 in my laptop (it's still a pretty good drive, shame to waste it). Saying that, the series 7 chipsets have sata3...

I'm not overly concerned about it failing as I have multiple backups, I learnt that you can't trust a drive a while back!
 
How full is the drive? SSDs that are full tend to slow down a lot unless they are Sync NAND.
 
It has 40gigs free now (~20%), it's never really grown much more than that before moving files elsewhere and the default download folder is on another drive. Plus I believe it has 16gigs of reserved space to aid wear levelling.

I just expected age better.
 
Not many:D, I was referring to the sequential speeds. Even the slowest SSD smokes any traditional hard drive in random access.
 
random 4k is all that matters most of the time

even for seq, unless you transfer files from one SSD to another, you are limited by the HDD speed anyway (e.g., transferring files from SSD to HDD or vice versa).

Sequential speed = marketing bullet point and not terribly important as long as it remains above the speed of your fastest HDD

if you want to restore speed run secure erase.
 
Yeah, when I switched from my 160 GB Vertex 2 to my Samsung 830 I decided to test it. My numbers were even worse than yours due to there being a bunch of garbage on the drive. I did a single defragment of the drive to force it to 'reset' so to speak and it helped tremendously. I imagine a secure erase would have helped even more but I didn't actually want to wipe the drive. So far my 830 has fared much better, as I expected it would.
 
If you want to try restoring performance get a PartedMagic bootable USB drive created and run an internal secure erase. Simply formatting in windows isn't the same thing.

With it being a vertex2 I'd also be ready for it to die any time, meaning keep regular backups of whatever's on it if important
 
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Defrag doesn't work the same on SSD as it does spinning disks, because access time is a non-issue, only I/O time. You're wasting time until you do a secure-erase - only then will you know best case scenario for speed going forward.
 
There's always some overhead from fragmentation (even in memory), I was curious to see how much it improved with a defrag.
 
Either TRIM doesn't work so well on these drives or it's just a matter of limited capacity causing higher write amplification.

Or the benchmark sucks.

Or the sequential numbers are for incompressible data.

Or any other set of OS crap is weakening performance.

Not that you can really get an accurate write benchmark on an OS drive.

Secure erase will restore performance... if OCZ implemented the function correctly.
 
Wiseguy2001 said:
There's always some overhead from fragmentation (even in memory), I was curious to see how much it improved with a defrag.
Click to expand...

In fact there is a chance that after defragmentation the drive got fragmented even more internally. And this is even more likely if TRIM isn't properly implemented.You have no control over the SSD's mapping. The only way to reliably defragment an SSD is to do a full backup (file level, not block level), secure erase it and then restore your backup.
 
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