Show us your SSD performance

Thanks for the important clarification on Intel drives Hopalong X My Bad ! . I do love the Intel toolbox.

Britton30 do not create an extra partition, just leave that portion unpartitioned. It is best created during installation, but can easily be created within Windows 7 by shrinking your existing partition. You can always recover that by expanding the very same partition, into the created manual OP.

Sorry about that. I will try to be more clear using an example. If you have a new SSD or a secure erased SSD of 100 GB, and create the partition of 90 GB, the balance of 10 GB will be ignored by your OS and be available as manual OP. Thus when you open My Computer in Windows it would show a drive with 90 GB capacity. Alternatively, if you went into Windows and shrank your existing partition and did not format/partition the new space created, it would qualify as manual OP.


At the risk of boring the heck out of you, and with some technical liberties I will try to outline a little more about the value of increasing manual OP. This does not mean that the following applies to all SSD's in exactly the same manner.

SSD's in spite of their blinding speed have a confluence of two different issues that require the OP.

Firstly, to back up manufacturers life projections for their SSD they have to recognize that unlike spinners (traditional hard drives) nand life in SSD's is reduced by successive writes. If any one group of nand's sees more activity than others, it's relative life is reduced. Therefore if the SSD allows indiscriminate writing to some nand's, they will wear out faster than others on the SSD. The wear leveling algorithms try to map each nand's level of activity and try to spread their use evenly across the SSD.

The second issue SSD's face is how they write information to each block. If a block is empty the SSD can write to it at blazing speeds. If a block is partially used and the SSD attempts to add information to it, it now has to read what information is already on the block, store this information in a different location and then write the new information and the old information on to the block. You can see how this read, save much process can be so time-consuming. Incidentally, SSD's that have been overwhelmed by over capacity and excessive writes, suffer from major slowdowns and this state is referred to as "hammered".

To avoid this process and facilitate wear leveling the SSD uses the OP similar to a scratch file. During periods of low CPU and disk activity, the internal algorithms within the SSD start to move information around to create totally clean blocks so that write speeds are maintained. However the wear leveling constraints will force the SSD to ensure all nand's are used evenly. This process requires an even more selective cleaning of blocks. This in turn is facilitated by the size of the scratchpad namely the OP. Trim instructions help the SSD to identify blocks that are ready for "cleaning" this obviously facilitates the process. Lacking trim, the garbage collection process has to do its own thing to identify, prioritize and clean blocks within the constraints of wear leveling.

This is why, SSD's really operate in three different modes in their lifetime.

The "fresh" mode, where all unused blocks are available for writing. Best speeds.

The "mapped" mode, where all blocks have been used at least once and the SSD wear leveling algorithms now selectively prioritize the use of blocks to ensure all that all blocks within the SSD experience the same amount of usage. This is also known as the steady state. Many users run benches complaining about the decline in SSD speeds not realizing that their SSD has now stabilized at the mapped mode. Manufacturers, obviously advertise fresh speeds.

The "hammered" mode occurs when the garbage collection/trim process cannot build clean blocks and additional writing to the SSD forces use of blocks that already contain data. In this case the SSD has to read this data, store this data, clean the block/blocks, and rewrite all the data (old and new) to the now clean block/blocks. You can see how complicated and slow the write operation now becomes. Here again the size of the OP can help in deferring this stage.

A secure erase to the drive in any one of the above states, allows a fresh start with all clean blocks. At regular but distant intervals, this is an excellent way to freshen up the SSD and while it will impact the overall SSD life by bypassing the wear leveling approach, it is not believed to be significant.

Yup. Sorry for being so verbose.
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