The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Restoring Your Drive to Peak Performance
Based on my explanation there’s one sure-fire way to make your drive fast again. Formatting/deleting everything on the drive won’t work because those pages on the drive will remain full of data.
If you are doing a clean setup of your machine and want to restore your drive to its native state you’ll have to perform a secure erase. Intel distributed a tool with the first X25-M review kits called HDD ERASE. This tool will take any SSD and free every last page on the drive. Obviously you’ll lose all of your data but your drive will be super fast again!
In order for HDDERASE to work you need to have your SATA controller running in Legacy IDE mode, you can select this in your BIOS. Your drive will have to be connected to one of the first four SATA ports off of the controller.
Boot to a command prompt (I just use a bootable DOS image on my USB stick) and run the executable. Answer its questions carefully and with honor.
Tell it you would like to perform a secure erase (an extended one isn’t necessary) and when it asks you if you wish to view LBA 0 you can say no. Reboot your machine (don’t forget to set your SATA controller back to whatever mode you had it in before, e.g. RAID or AHCI), partition your drive and you’re back in business.
On a good SSD I don’t believe there’s a need to secure erase periodically, but whenever you format or re-image your drive, I’d recommend a secure erase since you’re killing all of your data anyway.
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matrixireland - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link
hi would like to know what you pros think of the;Golden Leopard ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD? what would you add to it?
And how would you rate it against other ssd?
Specifications:
product description
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD is a high-performance design solid state drive based on the high-end micro-control IC with flash memory storage medium integrated advantaged of high speed,convenient ,aseismatic,energy-saving etc.
specification
Model
Size
Interface
Material
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD
1.8inch 70×54×6mm
ZIF
Aluminum-magnesium alloy appearance ,drawbench and colorful oxidation surface,elegant temperament
performance
read speed:80- 96Mbytes/second write speed:50- 60Mbytes/second
support ATA-7 V3 PIO/multi word/ultra DMA MODES
Low power TFBGA,4 channel of flash controller,masked ROM and data SRAM
SAMSUNG flash keeps the data faster on reliability and endurance
Dynamic and static wear-leveling prolong NAND FLASH and SSD for longer life
8/16 bit BCH ECC data error correction ability effectively guarantee the data read security.
Design consideration
Capacity
16G/32G/64G/128G/256G
Average access time
<0.25MS
operating temperature
0-85°
power consumption
DC Input Voltage(3.3V or 5 V ± 10%)Read and write:135mA/194Ma wait:70mA
shock
1500G
Application
the Laptop, pc, server,workstation,portable media player,digital collection apparatus and any computer equipment which need consecutive read and write speed and high reliability storage.
jay401 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
yeah, he wants "more expensive than" or "too expensive for".Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Second page as well:missing charts before and after this paragraph:
"The chart above shows how much faster these affordable MLC SSDs were than the fastest 3.5” hard drive in sequential transfers. But now look at random write performance:"
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
chart 1 on page 2 now shows sequential read but the paragraph is changed to mention random read ;)page 21: As far as I know, this is THE one of THE only reviews
Some very surprising benchmark results for the ocz vertex, I thought the new firmware tanked sequential read speeds (to 80-90) based on the explanation beforehand, but not according to the actual graphs.
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
third page, first table, first column: SSD and HDD entries are switchedmikaela - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
yeah great info. also great resourceSpoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
page 19: I’d never reviewed it'd & -ed?
HolyFire - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
"I'd never reviewed it" is correct. "I'd" here means "I had", it's Past Perfect tense.FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
That should have bolded "too"FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Also, I think the velociraptor vs X-25 figures are swapped. 6 odd ms for the intel drive and 0.11ms for the velociraptor..