Need help picking a SSD

[watercooled]

Over time, MLC SSD performance degrades, often by a significant ammount - TRIM helps to significantly slow/prevent this.

[Perfectionist]

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell right? Had to google it

Interesting, didn't know solid-states degrade, I think might be the PCI-E drives off for me then - would seem too much of a waste to buy a 1k drive because it's faster then it become the same as others, though, it depends - Just how bad is this deterioration, got any figures? Can't find much useful mentioning it...


By the way got a source for what you said about slower boot-up times with PCI-E SSDs? I haven't been able to find anything on that, just that some SSDs cannot be booted and some can

[watercooled]

Nah the deterioration I'm speaking of isn't permanent - it can be reset by erasing the drive but who would want to erase their drive all the time to keep top performance? Yeah SSDs wear out but that shouldn't lead to noticeable performance degradation and drives should have plenty of extra space to remap bad sectors to extend the useful life of the drive. I'm not sure how bad the deterioration would get TBH, I've not researched that bit.

Sorry forgot to answer your last line - a number of reviews comparing pros and cons of two interfaces have stated this, one of which was last month's issue (I think, possibly the month before) of CustomPC.

[TooNice]

SSD performance decay as you write/delete/re-write. Previously you would need to do a full wipe to keep the performance in top shape. TRIM diminishes that requirement. Even though it doesn't do the same thing at all, it's sometime of viewed as the SSD version of drefrag.
A better explanation of TRIM (and a overall good read) http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667

[djfarmo]

So Crucial have launched a FW update adding TRIM, but some folks are saying it has slowed their drive down, and Intel have launched a FW update that turns their SSDs into bricks...

When will we be able to buy a decent SSD with TRIM "off the shelf" - i.e. buy it with TRIM support, rather than having to upgrade it to get TRIM support?