Does reformatting hurt an SSD?

[iRage]

I've been hearing a lot of things about how SSDs are more sensitive and have a lower life, that you can only delete and write so much data before it slows down.

I got my first SSD with a new computer and I had some issues installing Windows 7, I had to install Vista, then do a clean install of 7, before having to reformat and install Vista again, when I was about to enter the Product Key for Vista, I got a error so I had to reformat and install Vista ONCE AGAIN, before installing Windows 7 for the last time.

Have I just done irreversible damage to my SSD? Have I unknowingly made it slower? I don't really have anything to compare it too, and while my boot times are fast, everything else feels more or less the same when I was installing drivers and software like anti-virus. Where do I truly notice the speed?

Have I actually made my SSD slower by doing all these reformats? I have a Intel 510 hooked up to a SATA 6GB/s Intel Connector.

 

[Ben90]

You could do that every day for a couple of years and the flash would still be within its rated lifespan.

 

[iRage]

So I'm just being paranoid? I'm kind of disappointed because I thought an SSD would be a huge change over my 6 year old Raptor. Did I just get a bad one? or are people over hyping SSDs?

 

[Emulex]

probably have it setup incorrect your old raptor is like 4-5ms access time an ssd should be 0.01 - do a full virus scan and let us know how fast it takes to read the full volume.


in my mac i keep both an ssd and velociraptors since the raptors are faster at writing linear sustained but i have to defrag them endlessly

 

[iRage]

Well, when I only scanned my SSD (C Drive) with Norton Internet Security 2011 it scanned 139,935 files in 34 seconds. I still have 96 GB out of 111 GB available and I've only installed drivers and a few necessities, like flash player, Mozilla, Norton, and some utilities.

Edit: A Full System Scan of 148,022 Files took me 1 minute and 11 seconds.

Edit 2: These were both done with Intelligent Skipping Scan on, I just turned it off and a Full System Scan took me 4 minutes and 52 seconds.

Would Crystal Mark tell me if my drives were working at optimal speeds?

 

[Morg.]

or are people over hyping SSDs?

Naaah why would people do that when they have a very clear idea of what an SSD is and what its performance metrics mean for their own usage pattern ...

Although, it does seem unlikely that a raptor would beat a last gen ssd, you may need to align it.

 

[talion83]

as a note, if you are formatting an SSD as a "security wipe" be careful as there have been issues with even DoD certified wipes not properly erasing an SSD.

As far as performance goes - while you may believe you have that 100GB+ free it might actually have been used up. Once the entire writeable space of a SSD gets used and it starts having to erase/reload data the performance decrease on some drives have been extensive (TRIM based issues I think). Most of the newer drives are doing a better job of cleaning up older data when the drive is idle which is reducing this. Do a search on your particular Intel drive and see if it was known to do this (ie: doing a search for 'ssd trim performance degregation')

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8 - is an older article on anand regarding SSD's.

 

[groberts101]

quick formatting does not write data across the entire drive. full formatting will write across the volume and obviously shouldn't be done for that very reason.

secure erasing the drive by initiating the built in ATA security measure will usually reset the drives controller and logical state(empty) of the nand. Not sure about that particular drive but can't see the protocol/command changing on any new models.