OCZ, Indilinx develop always-fast SSDs
updated 11:10 am EDT, Mon August 10, 2009
OCZ Anti Slowdown SSDs
OCZ and storage chipset maker Indilinx in the past few days have unveiled a new firmware technique for solid-state drives that could avert the chronic slowdown in write speeds on these disks. As any storage cell on an SSD needs to be completely re-written if any amount of data exists, many SSDs collect "garbage" data which is just enough to force a rewrite and slow down the regular data recording process. The new approach automatically scrubs data from these cells and effectively restores an SSD to a near-new state if left alone for enough time.
On a 120GB OCZ Vertex drive, most of the performance loss was restored within five minutes of the drive being idle, and a virtually complete restoraion took an hour. Different capacities adn the amount of space free are also likely to either help or hinder the amount of time spent.
It's not certain how soon the firmware upgrade will be available, but every OCZ Vertex series drive should get the option. It's also assumed that any other SSD using a similar Indilinx memory controller will also have the option of the upgrade. [via HotHardware]
