If you’ve been keeping up with the Development of SSD drives as they become more and more mainstream, you may have noticed that there is still some ways to go before SSD’s can become as prevalent as regular magnetic hard drives. The biggest sticking point I’m seeing right now is that there is a large speed difference between a brand new never written to SSD, and one that has been used for some time. Because of the way SSD’s work, each write to a cell on the drive sets it as a bit (a one or zero). Once that bit is set, it has to be erased before it can be written to and set again. On a new drive, this erasing operation does not need to be done because the bit has never been set, resulting in much faster write speeds the first time around. As the drive becomes used, and more cells are written to, the result is that more and more cells also need to be wiped again before writing to them. This results in the slowdown that we see. Once the drive has had all cells written to, the speeds reach their slowest, and the drive will now be at its real operating speed.
So what does this mean for you and me? Two things: when you decide to purchase an SSD drive, make sure you do your research, and look for third party benchmarks of the drive that measure both the performance of the drive when new, and the performance of the drive when it has been fully written to, so you can have better expectations of the drives performance. The second thing - and this is just a hunch on my part - I predict that if you hold off on buying an SSD, the manufacturers will eventually figure out a solution to this problem as the technology matures and becomes more mainstream.
SSD Drive manufacturers point out that even after an SSD has been written to, it will still have faster speeds than a magnetic hard drive, so if performance is the most important factor to you, an SSD drive is still the way to go for enthusiasts.
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