Sony VAIO Z2 performance degradation

Apologies in advance if this information is easily accessible somewhere, but I couldn't find any clear answers.

So, exactly a year after having my Z2, I thought I'd check my SSD performance. My machine has a 2x128gb RAID0 array and it's pretty full which should make things even slower. I had no benchmarks of mine to compare against, so instead, I took this as reference: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/603555-vaio-z2-ssd-performance-post-your-results-3.html

Although my read performance is holding up well, my write performance is pretty bad; roughly half of those numbers posted above, and even less in many cases. Presumably this has something to do with TRIM. I was thinking to do a clean install for Win8, and also remove some clutter from my disks, which should allow for some more free disk space. Is there anything I can do though, for restoring performance? I assume a simple format won't cut it, since that seems the same as marking a file as deleted, which causes the whole problem in the first place.

Any tips on how to restore performance? Extra bonus if you have tips on how to maintain performance after that.

Many thanks!

 

*bump* my performance after about a year as well

 

After a bit more searching I found this: https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

Which was taken from this discussion: maintenance - Restoring performance and estimating life of a used SSD drive? - Super User

I won't be able to try this for 10 more days. It is not clear whether it would work, since there are a number of things that could go wrong (I don't even know if a Linux LiveCD sees the RAID-0 array properly; can anyone confirm?).

Additional suggestions are welcome.

 

I brought the drive down to 57% capacity with some cleaning (vs 85% in posted benchmark), but saw little to no difference in later benchmarks.

Ran across this: Understanding SSD Advertised Performance and Its Purchase Implications - An SSD Primer - The SSD Review while googling around though, and was interested by the claim that sequential writes (my most hit benchmark) are potentially an almost negligible fraction of what my drive is actually doing. Also, 4K writes, my only benchmark above the posted Z2 measuring stick, could be much more important?

Such a large drop in benchmark scores is still unsettling, but it would help to know that it might not be impacting 'real world' performance as much as it might suggest.

 

Experiencing the same degradation on my Vaio Z2. It's about a year and a half old. I have the SATA II disks, 128GB. It's benching at 400 MB/s read, and around 58 MB/s sequential writes, which is USELESS. Can't even begin to express how much of a waste of time this laptop is.

 

Pretty interesting read. Without the benchmarks, has anyone actually noticed a difference?