Has anyone zero'd the cells on an SSD? [closed]
Has anyone zero'd the cells on an SSD? I've read that this is possible essentially making your ssd "new again"—has anyone tried this method? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD_memory_cell_clearing
Solution 1:
SSDs degrade over time because the 'cells' they use to store memory can only be written to a certain number of times before they start degrading. As SSDs degrade, they start to become slower and eventually stop working all together (though the drive usually fails before all memory cells become non-functioning).
To help slow down the rate at which SSDs degrade, many SSDs implement a technique called wear levelling, which requires a bit of additional memory management. In some SSDs, this can cause writes to become slower because it has to examine more memory blocks before it finds an unused are to write to (As mentioned here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8).
Thus, if the entire device is wiped (i.e. all bits are 'zeroed') and the data is rewritten to it, the memory will be rewritten in the order it went in and all clump near one are, meaning new writes should become faster again because there's now all the blank pages are grouped together and nothing needs to be overwritten.
At least, that's the theory. Now for the reality.
In reality all SSDs have different methods of reducing wear so this will only work for some. That article was written ~5-6 years ago, SSDs have changed a lot since then, they've become much better at reducing wear and employ different techniques.
Finally, remember that in clearing the entire SSD (i.e. writing a zero to every address) and then rewriting all its old data back onto it, you are performing quite a few writes to various cells. Depending on how your SSD actually works, this could improve write-speeds, but it could also not improve write speeds. One thing is guaranteed though, it'll wear down the SSD a bit and it will die a tiny bit faster. If you were to do this every week for the entire time you owned the SSD, you'd probably waste a fair chunk of its write limit just wiping it and writing data back to it.
Long story short: don't bother trying to screw around with tricks like this, just trust that the people with years of experience researching and designing SSDs know how to do wear levelling better than a bunch of self-proclaimed 'hackers'. Ultimately if your SSD write speeds are slow enough to be noticeably bad, you're better off buying a new SSD anyway.
Solution 2:
Zeroing means writing zeros (no charge) in all cells.
The cells can have 2 states, charged (=1) or not charged (=0).
The SSD (aka flash memory) will be set back to original manufacturing state, with all Cells set to zero.
However the process will not extend your SSD life time, actually the opposite, it will shorten it if used to often.
Over time of usage SSD becomes slower due to the collection of leftovers (garbage), since not all Cells have been cleared as they should.
Zeroing will help with that and make your SSD go faster again.
It is actually just another write cycle that is typically used when you want to secure erase the information on SSD.
Zero-filling an SSD which is not TRIM-capable is a trick used to improve write performance. SSD can write data quickly only to a blank (zero-filled) block. But if there are no blank blocks, then it is necessary to erase some blocks before new data can be written. The process of erasing takes a long time. The need to erase blocks decreases performance of an SSD without TRIM because of such an SSD cannot erase blocks in advance. Therefore, zero-filling applied to an SSD without TRIM speeds write operations up for a while.
Source: http://www.lowlevelformat.info/zero-filling.aspx