How to restore your SSD to peak performance

January 16, 2014

Back in the days when mechanical hard drives with spinning platters were the norm, you could simply hand your old hard drive to a deserving relative or friend as an upgrade, get a thank you, and call it a day. It’s not so simple with today’s solid-state drives. In many cases, used SSDs simply aren’t as fast as newer ones. The biggest issue in retasking, reselling, or even maintaining an SSD for a prolonged period stems from an inconvenient characteristic of NAND flash memory: Previously written cells must be erased before they can be rewritten with new data. If the SSD is forced to reuse cells rather than use new ones while storing data, performance will plummet. To avoid this problem with NAND flash memory, modern SSD controllers use a number of tricks, including building in extra capacity that users can’t touch—a technique known as over-provisioning. There’s also a command called TRIM that tells an SSD when blocks of memory are no longer needed and can be consolidated and erased. Sounds good, right? But there’s a catch. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2088341/how-to-restore-your-ssd-to-peak-performance.html#tk.rss_howto