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I have had an SSD for something like 5 years now. Lots of writing has caused it to slow. I am well aware of the issue, and why it happens.

I will be looking to replace it soon and my question is: Has any manufacturer solved this problem or have any improvements been made in this area at all?

  • I am not in a RAID environment
  • The drive's health check software reports that the disk is healthy there are no failed or bad blocks.
  • Yes, I mistakenly did heavy writing for a period before I understood the problems it would cause.
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The biggest improvement in this area is the TRIM command.

The following information is based off of the TRIM Wikipedia article.

Around 2009 the TRIM command was added to the ATA specification. So SSDs since then should support TRIM. TRIM helps keep an SSD fast by telling the SSD that data can be erased from flash. Erased flash is fast to write to.

The article above mentions that since 2014, most SSDs have background garbage collection mechanisms that optimize data. Optimization includes arranging stored data internally so that there is a maximum of erased flash (SSDs can store data in pages - but have to be erased in bigger blocks eraseblocks that contain multiple pages - so optimization includes collecting and "packing down" pages spread out over incompletely used eraseblocks into single eraseblocks.).

Some RAID setups do not support or pass through TRIM.

Some encrypted drive setups do not support TRIM.

Windows XP does not support TRIM.

So since your SSD is from 2012, it may have something to do with your operating system or RAID setup.

It's also possible if you've done very heavy writing to it (TBs a day) that a lot of the internal flash is bad and the drive is running out of "overprovisioned" space which many drives use to provide freshly erased flash for requests. Check the SMART status of your drive using a utility from your drive manufacturer or other utility.

Back up your data before doing this, but check for and apply any firmware updates to the drive.

Since you are replacing it soon - another improvement has been the bus attachment.

Newer SSDs use the M.2 standard - which takes the device off of a SATA controller and attaches it directly to the PCI Express bus. These allow SSDs to read/write faster than the 600MB/sec of SATA-III. Your motherboard must support this or you must use a PCI-E to M.2 adapter.

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  • Thanks! I will double check the results of the SMART status check tonight
    – GWR
    Commented Oct 3, 2017 at 13:22
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    And it's also good idea to not to fill the SSD over 80% as then the internal logic may get too interested in internal data reshufling casing performance penalty.
    – Jaroslav Kucera
    Commented Oct 3, 2017 at 14:01

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