fastest hard drive

[Perfectionist]

Wait, are we talking permanant deterioration now, I'm confused?

You said the performance deteriorates over time and needs a full erase to restore it, is it still damaged after ala rechargeable battery longevity?

... Is this lasting several years before being broken beyond use or several years before needing a wipe (by full wipe I'm guessing you mean zeroing every byte rather than reformatting)?

Does sound worrying. Don't OCZ Vertex Turbo / Corsair X256 drives have TRIM?

I thought it was only Intel that were bricking?

[watercooled]

Well SSD performance deteriorates over time; how quick I don't know but it's temporary and zeroing the drive restores performance and AFAIK it's the same as it was when new. Flash memory wears out over time so flash drives have a bit of spare space which cannot be seen by the OS but if any blocks of in-use memory fail the drive can remap the block to the spare space but over time that is used up so then the OS starts to notice bad sectors which would stop using them. In theory this could continue slowly until the drive has so little space it becomes useless but since load is evenly distributed the whole drive normally fails within a short space of time. From what I've read SSDs are expected to last 3-4 years of medium use before failure. I'm not too sure which drives have TRIM but I remember reading about other firmwares that were damaging drives somehow but I don't think it was as bad as the Intel one. Also on some drives if you flash the firmware the whole drive is erased - something to check before you update...