Performance Over Time and TRIM

Performance Over Time:

After a particularly fragmenting portion of our test sequence, I run a couple of HDTach passes to get a feel for how well the drive can defragment portions of itself on-the-fly, and without TRIM at play. I use these results to compare with how the SSD looks after it has been re-fragmented and then TRIMmed. Back in the 512GB 850 Pro review, we saw excellent performance here. Let's see how that result scaled down to the same workload applied to all capacities:

1TB:

512GB:

256GB:

128GB:

This is an expected and proportional response to the same amount of fragmentation workload applied to smaller and smaller capacities. The effect on the smallest capacity seems extreme, but this is an expected effect of writing almost the capacity of this whole SSD with a very torturous workload. To see if sequential writes have 'cleaned up' the fragmentation, we run a subsequent pass – here's the 128GB result:

All clean, and with no use of TRIM to boot. The results here show very minimal fragmentation effects in the 512GB and 1TB models. 256GB is not very noticeable, but I would resist going with a RAID-5 of 128GB models (of *any* SSD for that matter). For those unaware, Intel RAID-0 passes TRIM, but RAID-5 does not.

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