name='Freak' said:
Why do they degrade? Is it like normal HDDs getting fragmented?
as the drives are used, cells are written to. but then when data is deleted, the cells aren't emptied, just marked as deleted.
this is usually not a big problem because of wear levelling algorithms allowing the drive to only write to that same cell again after every other cell has been written to once.
but after all the cells have been used, when the drive comes to write more data to a previously filled cell, it has to physically erase it before writing again, causing slowdown.
TRIM support will change this. As you delete a file, the OS sends a TRIM command as well and clears the cells as required or cleans when idle
Write amplification also plays a small part if the smallest block that can be written to is larger than the data being written. in which case the whole larger block of cells has to be read, the smaller data added then all written back to the ssd again
the vertex and other indilinx based drives actually suffer from degredation much less than the intel and samsung drives (according to anandtech)
name='Jim' said:
Yeah its very wise to run it. My Vertex RAID array has gone to complete sh*t after about 4 months use. Problem now is that I've got all the crap of putting them in another machine if I want to flash them with new FW as i have a feeling that you cant flash while they are RAID'ed.
yeah, need to change to IDE mode for flashing
if you are on 1.30 already, i think the future flashes should be non-destructive
