The best way to restore SSD performance?

Ok, I'm getting my new soon with the SSD. The SSD is fast and would like to keep it that way. Since there's no trim support and defrag is really bad?
What should I do to keep performance up? Been following all the threads, but there doesn't seem to be a clear cut way to restore the SSD to out of factory state.

Wouldn't a restore to factory defaults using the restore discs do this? Whats the best way?

 

Well if performance is a huge factor, then the drive can be imaged to another HDD, then reset the SSD's with the reset tool, then the newly reset SSD's can be re-imaged and restored. What SSD are you getting and what model VAIO is it going in? If the SSD has an Indilinx controller, you can manually TRIM the drive.

 

What reset tool?
Also, the BIOS is crippled to only run in RAID mode, not in IDE or AHCI mode, so utilities like HDDerase won't work.

To the OP: Install the latest Intel software RAID drivers. Apparently, they support TRIM under RAID 0, which should solve most of the problems.

Also, try to keep a good chunk of free space on your drive. This gives wear levelling more leeway to operate, and also helps prevent "peghole fragmentation", where on a nearly full drive, almost all free blocks will be individual blocks smack in the middle of other written data. The impact of this is similar to not having TRIM, but can easily be avoided by avoiding filling the disk too much, and very occasionally run a consolidation-only defragmentation.
A good rule of thumb is to try to keep below 80% full on a "mixed use" drive. The bigger the drive, the higher towards full you can go.

 

For some reason, I didn't sub-in that missing Z. I've been up for 42hrs ATM, go easy. And the reset tool I was talking about is HDDErase, but yes... the new Intel Raid Drivers cover TRIM commands in RAID 0 configurations, so rest easy.

 

I found following information on Intel website

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume.

A defect was filed to correct the information in the Help file that states that TRIM is supported on RAID volumes.

It seems to me that TRIM isn't supported for RAID!

 

That is correct.

TRIM + RAID = No workie, even with 9.6

 

Zoinks is right re TRIM & RAID

If you have the new Z (VPC-Z1x), you can hack the BIOS (see psystar's post) to expose IDE/ACHI modes. However, even so HDDerase doesn't work in either mode. If you really want to secure erase the Sony SSD you need to run hdparm.

 

Mac OS is specifically designed to prevent disk fragmentation which is effect is the issue at hand for SSD.Restoring performance to an ssd is not that difficult.Basically you need to defrag the drive then reset all the nand cells.There is no cache on the SSD so there are no benefits to write caching.There are conflicting reports on whether this gains speed or not.

 

Quotes from Wikipedia re SSD ( Solid-state drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

File fragmentation has negligible effect, again because data access degradation due to fragmentation is primarily due to much greater disk head seek activity as data reads or writes are spread across many different locations on disk - and SSDs have no heads and thus no delays due to head motion (seeking).

Defragmenting the SSD is unnecessary. Since SSDs are random access by nature and can perform parallel reads on multiple sections of the drive (as opposed to a HDD, which requires seek time for each fragment, assuming a single head assembly), a certain degree of fragmentation is actually better for reads, and wear leveling intrinsically induces fragmentation.[24] In fact, defragmenting a SSD is harmful since it adds wear to the SSD for no benefit.[25]