Slow RAID SSD performance

cavemanoc · 25 Aug 2011 at 14:06

I have a pair of Samsung SSD (60ish GB) drives in my laptop and the performance has been degrading steadily over time. I now get:

They are pretty old drives, just pre-dating the trim updates (can't remember the model number) but the write performance was considerably better when I first installed them. I have about 30GB of 120GB let free. Is there any good garbage collection software I can run on a one-off basis to breathe some life back into them? I don't really want to go through the pain of imaging the drives and reformatting etc...

cavemanoc · 25 Aug 2011 at 18:05

cavemanoc said:
They are pretty old drives, just pre-dating the trim updates ...snip.... Is there any good garbage collection software I can run on a one-off basis to breathe some life back into them? I don't really want to go through the pain of imaging the drives and reformatting etc...

The drives don't support trim (even individually) - all I really need is a piece of software that does garbage collection on the empty space. There must be something out there by now that does it?

cavemanoc · 19 Sep 2011 at 10:22

Just a thought - I noticed CCleaner has a "Wipe Free Space" option that does exactly what I was talking about - effectively overwriting all the empty space on the drive - would this not achieve the same goal as the standard garbage collectors?

cavemanoc · 20 Sep 2011 at 08:41

bradders2000 said:
SSD performs best when the NAND hasn't been touched (as in, ever written to).

The only way to get it back to that stage is to Secure Erase the drive (or TRIM those areas). Wiping free space (where TRIM isn't working) will do more harm than good.

So the best thing you can do is take an image, break the RAID, SE each drive, recreate the RAID and then put the image back.

What's the source for this? Seems counter-intuitive. (A bit that reads zero, reads zero irrespective of how it got there?)

I will run the wipe overnight and see what happens - will be interesting to see.