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Long-Term Performance Analysis of Intel SSDs
Vigile writes "When the Intel X25-M series of solid state drives hit the market last year, there was little debate that they were easily the best performing MLC (multi-level cell) offerings to date. The one area in which they blew away the competition was with write speeds — initial reviews showed consistent 80MB/s results. However, a new article over at PC Perspective that looks at Intel X25-M performance over a period of time shows that write speeds are dramatically reduced from everyday usage patterns. Average write speeds are shown to drop to half (40MB/s) or less in the worst cases, though the author does describe ways that users can recover some of the original drive speed using standard HDD testing tools."
Reader MojoKid contributes related SSD news that researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a new power supply system which will significantly reduce power consumption for NAND Flash memory.
Well, they got used to the idea that Ext never fragmented much because quite frequently it would corrupt itself and force a restore from tape. This naturally defragments the filesystem, leaving another six or so months until another automatic defragmentation was triggered. Now that newer versions don't fail so often, the true internal degragmentor is relied on. So now its quite frequent to see operational departments do the wipe-restore on a yearly basis to improve FS performance. This is pretty much the solution that linux admins will tell you to do, and the lack of a backup on your personal machine isn't their concern.