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As is thoroughly pointed out in this article by AnandTech, SSDs suffer from inevitable performance degradation over time, as each and every sector has eventually been written to. Once that has happened, the drive needs to erase an entire 512K block before it can write to a page again, which severely affects writing speed.
There are different approaches to deal with this problem. One that at least works with the Intel X25-M SSD is to use a tool which wipes the entire drive using the "secure erase" command. This can be accomplished with the Intel tool "HDD ERASE", which is said to work with pretty much any hard drive, as the "secure erase" command is part of the ATA specification. Also, Intel and OCZ have published new firmware revisions for their drives which work around the problem to a certain extent. OCZ even claims to support the ATA "TRIM" command which will be used by the final version of Windows 7 to ensure that file deletion on an SSD actually triggers a block erase rather than a simple overwrite, thus preventing most of this internal fragmentation from taking place. More on these new firmware revisions can be found here.
That said, I have three questions concerning the RunCore SSDs:
1. Is it possible to use the HDD ERASE tool safely without destroying the RunCore SSDs (I own a 64G RunCore SATA PCIe SSD)? If so, does this actually restore the drive to full speed, i.e., will the "secure erase" ATA command actually make the firmware erase blocks?
2. Is RunCore planning on releasing an improved firmware, just like OCZ and Intel did, which works around the problem?
3. Is Runcore planning on releasing a tool which erases all blocks on the SSD which are marked by the OS as deleted/free sectors? This would be a great improvement over the HDD ERASE method, as the latter shortens the lifespan of the drive by erasing every block which can only be done a limited number of times. I heard that OCZ offers such a tool for their Vertex SSD. Also, one would be able to restore the drive to full speed without having to delete everything beforehand.
I'm also interested if RunCore is thinking about supporting the TRIM command, which, if employed by the OS, should eliminate the need to run a separate tool every now and then.
There are different approaches to deal with this problem. One that at least works with the Intel X25-M SSD is to use a tool which wipes the entire drive using the "secure erase" command. This can be accomplished with the Intel tool "HDD ERASE", which is said to work with pretty much any hard drive, as the "secure erase" command is part of the ATA specification. Also, Intel and OCZ have published new firmware revisions for their drives which work around the problem to a certain extent. OCZ even claims to support the ATA "TRIM" command which will be used by the final version of Windows 7 to ensure that file deletion on an SSD actually triggers a block erase rather than a simple overwrite, thus preventing most of this internal fragmentation from taking place. More on these new firmware revisions can be found here.
That said, I have three questions concerning the RunCore SSDs:
1. Is it possible to use the HDD ERASE tool safely without destroying the RunCore SSDs (I own a 64G RunCore SATA PCIe SSD)? If so, does this actually restore the drive to full speed, i.e., will the "secure erase" ATA command actually make the firmware erase blocks?
2. Is RunCore planning on releasing an improved firmware, just like OCZ and Intel did, which works around the problem?
3. Is Runcore planning on releasing a tool which erases all blocks on the SSD which are marked by the OS as deleted/free sectors? This would be a great improvement over the HDD ERASE method, as the latter shortens the lifespan of the drive by erasing every block which can only be done a limited number of times. I heard that OCZ offers such a tool for their Vertex SSD. Also, one would be able to restore the drive to full speed without having to delete everything beforehand.
I'm also interested if RunCore is thinking about supporting the TRIM command, which, if employed by the OS, should eliminate the need to run a separate tool every now and then.
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