Windows, solid-state disks, and 'trim'

It's a little-known fact that all solid-state disks — all of them — suffer inevitable performance declines over time. It's the Achilles' heel of all solid-state drives!

Reader Peter Jackson encountered this, and wrote:

• "I have a 64GB solid-state hard drive, but no way to restore it to factory-new condition. It has to do with getting the 'pages' to read as empty and not just overwritten. It's important to all SSD users, as the performance degradation is something [all SSDs] eventually suffer from.

  "The few solutions I've found are very complex; so far, I haven't been able to get any of them to work. My SSD seek times degrading from .1 [millisecond] to .4 or .5 may sound silly, but it's not."
  

Performance degradation over time is a known issue with all SSDs. There are a number of contributing factors, and some of the worst culprits are standard disk operating commands that were originally designed for use on magnetic, spinning-platter hard drives. SSDs operate differently, and that leads to problems — especially when attempting to reuse previously accessed data blocks, such as the former location of deleted files.

My column in this week's Windows Secrets newsletter explains why all SSDs are susceptible to this slowdown, and how a new command built into Windows 7 and Server 2008 can help. In fact, right now, Win7 and Server 2008 are the only OSes that offer full, native support for this new SSD-specific command: They're the only OSes that let you get the most out of an SSD right out of the box!

Full details are in the column.

Other topics in my column this week:

• Dealing with undeletable Registry keys
• 'Ghost' serial ports clutter a Windows XP setup
• Powerful, free alternative to Device Manager

That's my portion of this week's newsletter, but as usual, I'm only one of the contributors. Other items from other authors this week include:

• Make tech rebates work for you, not against you
• Highly efficient mouse tricks and 'gestures'
• Install Windows 7 many times from one USB drive
• Microsoft licensing portal offline for weeks

Access to all the above content is almost free: You pay only what you think the WindowsSecrets newsletter is worth (there's no set fee--- you decide); whatever you pay that once gets you access to all the paid content, including my columns, for an entire year.

Want to have a question answered in that column? Use the "contact" info at the end of the column to send in questions you might like me to try answering. And you can also rate the content to let me know how I'm doing.

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Posted via email from Fred's posterous