Fragmentation over time and TRIM
A few performance snapshots taken throughout our testing:
Initial HDTach pass on a brand new drive pegs the SATA2 interface across the board.
Read speeds drop slightly after the first pass, now that the drive has actual data present.
Fragmentation after our test suite causes a further hit to sequential reads, while writes remain unscathed.
ATTO on a new and clean Vertex LE.
ATTO after testing shows little to no impact on performance.
TRIM
Unlike the self-healing Kingston SSDNow V Series, the Vertex LE is subject to a slight performance drop as it is filled to capacity. As you can see above in the HDTach passes, writes are never really effected, but a drop in read speeds is seen, likely due to the way the Sandforce controller copes with the additional overhead of tracking previous random writes. This only seems to effect some very specific types of reads, and we saw a minimal impact on overall performance. Our TRIM test focuses on these specific weaknesses, and we were able to see TRIM functioning as expected under Windows 7. Impact was marginal, however, since the LE keeps its performance on the high side and write speeds pegged regardless of the state of internal fragmentation.
The OCZ Toolbox has not yet been tweaked to accommodate the LE, so we did not evaluate Secure Erase in that respect. Instead, we wiped the drive using HDDErase and saw expected results.
