SSD Factory Reset

Guys,

My WONDERFUL family purchased me two Crucial m4 512 SSD's over the weekend for my EON (aka. Clevo P170hm, Sager NP8170). These things fly!

However, I do have one question/concern that I'm hoping someone knows the answer to.

It's my understanding that SSD's - over time - tend to lose their performance and can only be refreshed by doing a 'secure erase'. I've looked into the various methods of doing this. The most doable appears to be booking into a Linux distro, suspending the notebook, waking it up and then using hdparm to zap the drive.

I've played with various live CD's and have been unable to find one that can successfully sleep and then wakeup the unit to disable the ATA security 'frozen' state. Does anyone have any suggestions on one that does work?

Or, is the whole secure erase deal no longer necessary?

Since I've never used SSD's before I'm totally in over my head and need guidance from you folks.

 

I would think that the manufacturer provides utilities to do this. Intel includes Intel SSD Toolbox which can reoptimize the drive. Performance degradation was mostly an issue on first generation SSDs that lacked the TRIM command. Your Crucial SSDs are newer, so you have little to worry about.

I'm jealous. Those two SSDs cost almost the same amount as my laptop!

 

The utilities provided by the manufacturer are all you need. TRIM support has handled garbage collection well enough that there isn't much else you need to do anymore (including the utilities). It is true though that SSD's tend to fail over time. This is why they are "overprovisioned" when manufactured - which simply means that if you bought a 128GB drive, it might actually have 20% more storage, or around 156GB of space on it. That extra space is used for various things, like internal swap for the controller, replacing failing sectors, and handling garbage collection.

Most SSD's will stay at the rated size for quite a while with full performance because they can pull from the overprovisioned space when needed, though eventually you may notice the drive size shrinking in a few years as that space runs out. (not all drives support this though)

 

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

here is how to perform a reset using hdparm command. you do have to make sure the motherboard supports hdparm or it won't work. I don't have my p170hm yet so can't confirm on the subject

 

If you are running Windows 7, the secure erase deal should not be necessary.

If you are putting the drives into RAID.. At least the drives have garbage collection routines which should keep performance up.

 

So, just to make sure I'm understanding everyone correctly...

It is no longer necessary to secure erase, wave a dead chicken, etc. to keep them operating at top performance? I basically clean install Windows and let things 'be'?

 

Essentially. There are a few windows tweaks you can make to improve the lifespan though, like disabling the paging file and turning off the disk defrag service among others. As long as the drives support TRIM, Windows can basically keep them running just fine on it's own.

But as mentioned, you may want to look into some of the extra tweaks you can do to settings to add that extra bit of performance and life extending goodness.

 

May want to check this out - Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Also, a note about virtual memory and the page file. See the "Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?" section in the above link.