Our new reviewer and podcast star, Allyn Malventano, has finished some exhaustive testing of solid state drives in a high workload scenario.  He and Ryan have been seeing plummeting performance from some of the SSDs they have used, and the Intel X-25M in particular.  It turns out that while the data on an SSD can be considered to be fragmented, the absolute worst thing to do is run a defragmenting program on your drive, it will make the problem worse.  Read the full reivew not only to see what causes the performance degradation and how to avoid it, but also for a detailed look at how SSDs do their magic and what to expect from UIntel and other HDD manufacturers in the near future.

“Dozens of different scenarios were played out on our drives. XP/Vista installs, repeated application/game installs, batch copying of files, and custom IOMeter access patterns were all liberally applied to the X25-M. Various combinations of the above all seemed to point to one common denominator – all three of our SSDs suffered a drop in performance regardless of the type of workload applied to them. The next sections will explore the issues at hand while simultaneously addressing any steps that can be done to counter the effects at play.”

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