How to Secure Erase an SSD to restore its performance

Nice, clear concise video, thank you.

Would have been nice to see a before/after 'scores' after doing this though.

I don't use Secure Erase on my SSD's, I simply 'format' them at the Windows Setup (advanced) screen and let them sit for up to 5 minutes while I'm doing something else. (I then delete the partition and then OP it as I normally do).

Why I don't SE SSD's is because of the remarkably high voltage needed to reset the nand chips back to the default state. This is more harmful than any performance boost that is temporarily gained by SE'ing them (how temporary? only as long as it takes to clean install Win10 back on to them).

 

I forgot to do a test but the snappiness factor has increased.

 

Random R/W should improve ever so slightly!
Is parted magic free to download?

Doing it every week/month will kill the drive. Doing it yearly basis won't destroy it.

 

It will 'destroy' it more than doing a PerfectDisk defrag every week/month though (52/12 times a year).

OP'ing means you don't need to worry about this for 'performance' reasons.

 

I believe you used to say Diskeeper was the best.
I used MSFT defragger with /X to align all free blocks which did improve write speed.

 

OP and free disk space is the same is it not?

 

No, OP and free disk space are not the same w/regards to performance (I can search for you later). I don't think I've 'used' Diskeeper except to test maybe. PerfectDisk is much more preferred. All other defraggers cause unnecessary writes to the drive while defragging without fully defragging it either.

 

I used Raxco in trial mode for 1 or 2 days. I think I was able to replicate few things using Contig and default defrag tool included by MSFT. I think Raxco and contig/msft defrag almost wrote 8-10GB with Raxco eating some 15GB with their deep optimization on-the-fly defrag OptiWrite or something.

Think of OP as a breathing space for SSD when its clobbered with intensive write workloads when NAND blocks gets reserved/allocated counts decreases continuously and SSD controller needs to update the current free blocks(in background).
I never saw benefits for my use-case since I always maintain 75% free-space and do manual TRIMs to keep it in tip-top shape.
I don't think you won't notice a perf. difference besides the increased endurance which Micron/Toshiba/Samsung claim in their Enterprise SSD whitepapers.

 

You don't follow the ssd doctor? http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...sd-recommendation.829941/page-8#post-11047616

 

@Vasudev, if you're using OptiWrite in PerfectDisk on a platform with only SSD's installed, you're using it wrong.

After the initial 3 full passes (plus two 'Offline' while the platform is rebooting) and the following settings, the extra writes are minimal. (These initial passes are with a brand-new SSD and a clean Windows10x64Pro install, only).

• Hibernation - Disabled
• Swap File - Set to Manual at Min/Max 1024MB (with 32GB RAM platforms or larger).
• PerfectDisk OptiWrite - Off
• The following SMARTPlacement Settings (see image below).
• The system is defragged at least every second Tuesday/Wednesday of each month (after MS Update Tuesday).
• Production/heavily used workstations are defragged before each 'project' is started on any specific platform. Minimum once per week and on many drives (depending on how they're used), up to 3 times per day (during lunch/breaks/etc.).

 

Thank you, brother, @Papusan for finding the link for me. Where does the time go?

 

Hmm.. That custom strategy was grayed out for me in evaluation mode.