Fragmentation over time and TRIM
Fragmentation Over
Time:
In our fragmentation testing, all drives behaved exactly like the Vertex LE we reviewed back in February. By exactly I mean less than 1% variance. Here is a sample:
Clean:
After first pass write:
After fragmentation pass:
Clean ATTO:
Fragmented ATTO:
TRIM
SandForce units see only a slight performance drop as they are 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 performance remains very good with write speeds pegged regardless of the state of internal fragmentation. Short version: Writes are so fast and performance remains so high that TRIM is not needed to keep the speeds up.
