Thread: SSD Are Me!
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Old 10-22-2010, 04:27 PM   #37
photon
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For drive compression, the answer really is "it depends".

If it's a Sandforce based drive I can definitely say it'd be a bad thing.. the drive already has write compression built in and compressing the data at an OS level is just going to make the system even slower to no benefit. Plus going through the whole drive and compressing everything (in effect re-writing every bit of data) is going to have a pretty significant impact on the SSD's performance, its wear prevention stuff is going to kick in big time reducing performance noticeably.

I just did something similar where I had to repartition my SSD and I was dumb and put the new partition at the beginning and it basically moved every file... I checked my performance after that it it was half to 1/4 what it should have been! I had to secure erase the drive and restore from an image.

Mind you SSDs are still so fast 1/4 performance will probably not be noticed in most cases, but I'm performance minded.

Other SSDs will have different reactions to such a thing, controllers without compression might actually benefit from it somewhat from a data throughput point of view, but latency will increase due to the time compressing and decompressing.

I would rather have a big drive or network drive and offload some files rather than compressing the drive.
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