secure erasing ssd question

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kdfresh09

New Member
so, im wondering, say in about 3 months or maybe 6, i notice my ssd drives losing space and slowing down. if i do a secure erase, does that "reset" the drive and make the blocks and cells "new" again? will it reset the amount of writes it has already done? thanks. and another thing. i have 2 x 40gig intel ssd on raid 0 for a total of 74 gigs. i also have 2 x 1tb 7200 rpm 32mb cache hdd in raid 0. should i just install 2 or 3 games on the empty space of the ssd, which is 60 gigs, or just install all my games on the other stripe? will i notice a difference in load times over the hdd? (keep in mind that the ssd and hdd are both in a raid 0 with identicle drives).
 
ive already read through that and im using raid now, and it is working fine with the ssd drives. the intel x 25 v 40 gig drives, along with others im sure, support raid now. i checked the trim support through the command prompt and it reads back 0 so thats good to go. other than that being a concern i dont see why raid wouldnt be an option. if any one could share some opinions on my set up that would be great. as far as raid is concerned on my ssd drives. 100% good to go. i read through the ssd set up guide and did everything in it to a T, no problems at all. all my user files are on the hdd raid, while OS, and small programs like handbreak, drivers ect are on the ssd raid. still have about 64 gigs available on the ssd raid, so back to the original questions. thanks
 
You shouldn't have to erase in 3 or 6 mo. But I know what you're after.

Hopfully you shrunk the partition or are not going to fill it too close, because too full will decrease the performance. Instead of having those free clean cells to move data in and out of, it will have to move data to move data, know what I mean?(50% reduction in write time)

Lets say yes on the "new again" cells because using a proper cleaning solution will revive diminished performance. Just keep in mind the Garbage Collection. When cells are cleaned, there will still be residuals of data, even if its just the 1's or 0's done during cleaning, that the controller will move around to get it out of it's filing way,,untill that moved data is deemed unneeded. At which time, that unneeded data will be cleaned away. Garbage Collection cleans as well.

The writes don't reset. Can't strike a match twice.

With 64gbR you obviously have some room to work with, and would be noticably faster than the hddR. I'd say put it to good use and put what you /want/will benifit/use the most/ for the load and working speeds. If it's favorite games you play often, depends on how you feel about the load times. If you soley want that as fast as you can get it, then of course SSD. If it's game play try a little investigation of those games. I don't know too much about the playing of games(yet). I know WoW is one that benifits from a SSD.

Hope that helps, and congradulations, you may be the 1st one to use the approved guide. :D :good:
 
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You never should wipe an SSD.

SSDs unlike normal drives, use flash memory. Flash memory has a limited amount of reads and writes, and will degrade with each write to the memory. Google around for photographers' rants about SD cards, CF cards, MS cards, etc., degrading over time. They get slower and slower with use.

Benny Boy, what are you talking about? Garbage Collection? That's a way to minimize memory usage in software. Certain software does not just benefit from an SSD, any software that has to reference the file system often will benefit from an SSD.
 
Benny Boy said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review
Click to expand...

Apparently garbage collection is now an industry term now for SSDs, that escaped me. That's strange to be seen on the hardware-side, because how does the controller distinguish valid from invalid without the consultation of the file system? A file system is a glorified data structure, e.g., a binary tree, a linked list, etc., and I can't find documentation as to how it is performed algorithmically.

I don't know if Anandtech is revealing all the cards there. There's more to it than that, I believe there are some file system issues that are left to be discussed.

But that's cool, it's new to me.

Edit: Just did more research, it seems like SSDs will wear out more quickly now that garbage collection is reading/writing while the drive is "idle"-these drives have no idle with garbage collection.
 
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AE7 said:
Edit: Just did more research, it seems like SSDs will wear out more quickly now that garbage collection is reading/writing while the drive is "idle"-these drives have no idle with garbage collection.
Click to expand...
More quickly than what? The affects of not having collection? What would that be?
 
thanks for all the replies and info guys. that seemed to clear some things up a bit. so basicaly when the drive reachs its write limit, its toast. and i didnt shrink the drive (partition) when i installed windows. when i was reading through the guide and came across the section telling you about shrinking the drive so there is a 10% or 20% section of the total partition size not used, it also said "option" and states to not fill the drive to max capacity. so since i didnt shrink the drive down to a smaller size, i just made sure i left 17 gigs free which is more than 20% of 74 gigs. is this the same pretty much as shrinking the drive? and as far as the games installed on the ssd raid, i think for sure that load times are much faster than stanard single hdd. hands down. i say this cause i also have 2 x 1 tb drives in raid, and have games installed on that as well as the ssd raid, and the hdd raid loads the games pretty fast, and the ssd are id say 70% faster than those, so it would probably load games 150% faster than a single hdd. and from what ive noticed, with the 5 games i have on the ssd, they all benifet from being on the ssd. pretty happy with all my components, aside from poor quality pny gtx 470's. really iffy on upping the voltage on them through afterburner. my first one i had ran fine until i upped it then with in 30 min it died. got it replaced and left it alone. got my 2nd one, tried again, artifacting horrible then died after 1 hour. replaced that one, which was DOA, then another one came, tried upping it again, its okay, as well as the 1st replacement, so both are at 1087 volts for maybe 45 minutes at a time since i do 45 - 60 min game sessions, then put them back, cause i know if i keep it up too long, ill fry these ones too.
 
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Thats good. Even tho the makers overprovision some cells that are only used to replace failed ones, keeping that unfilled margin means the controller won't have to shuffle blocks of data around as much. It's usually the controllers that wear before the cells die.
 
sweet deal then. ill be sure not to use more than what i am right now. but what about uninstalling games after i have finished with them? shoould i uninstall as soon as i am done with one and then install another one, or wait till all games are finished being played, then unistall all of them at one time, and install 5 new games? how will this effect the ssd?
 
Well, it's data in and data out, no matter how it's done: install/uninstall/delete/copy/whatever. The controller writes, the controller erases,,and the cells are filled, then cleaned. It isn't a critical thing under normal use. But with 5 games at 5-10gb(I think) I wouldn't want to load and unload that much very often. The normal user in/out gb is about 20 per day. Ideally you just want to put on it what you want to stay. If you can, just keep the fav's on it and leav'em there. If you like to switch around a lot, leave them on the hddR.
 
Benny Boy said:
More quickly than what? The affects of not having collection? What would that be?
Click to expand...

Quicker than what life expectancy would be without an aggressive garbage collection.

Not having garbage collection would make the drive slower when compared to other SSDs, however it would still outperform a mechanical hard disk.
 
AE7 said:
Quicker than what life expectancy would be without an aggressive garbage collection.

Not having garbage collection would make the drive slower when compared to other SSDs, however it would still outperform a mechanical hard disk.
Click to expand...
Depends on how much garbage you produce. If uncollected, the controller that does all the writes and erases, does everything twice. That's what makes it slower and fail sooner. They fragmnent, so w/o TRIM and GC you use up write cycles and go thru the trouble of erase/reinstall to get perf. back. Or might as well use a HDD.
 
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