So, I am starting this thread to let other members see information given about SSD's and their specifications. I can also list tools for you to bench your drives, as well as keeping your drive to tip top performance. First thing first... I had seen a few questions about: "What is Throttling?" or like.. "What is an OOB Reset?" Here is what I can give you to be as example: OOB Reset = To be the factory setting speed out of Box when you first used it. Over time the drive will wear... but SSD's are supposed to keep the same speed even if out of box, the only ones that do this are HGST, Toshiba, Seagate, Sandisk, and Samsung. They have a longer wear and takes a while to beat them down a notch on speed. Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, other brands, and unfortunately the Samsung EVO's (they have crap firmware that did this on there), throttle their drives from there 500+ MB/s down to 200 or below MB/s on the reads, and the writes are worse. It gets throttled after so much data is written to it. To get them like the OOB performance, you must Secure Erase the SSD's to run all Zeros across the NAND to clear it. This will clear the settings of the drive and be like it came fresh out of manufacturer. However you can get a tool just like Intel to check the drive longevity too, to check how much life the drive has left. For example, I did 1MB Random Writes/Read for 4 hours on the Intel 3500 Series SSD, after I did an OOB Performance test. OOB was 480 MB/s on Read.... and 450 MB/s on Writes... sure that seems a tad worthy... However, after the 4 hours of the 1MB test, I re-ran the performance and noticed a weird thing. It dropped from 480 on the Reads to 450 MB/s, and from 450 to 400MB/s on the writes... not bad... but the problem was this lasted for 10 seconds... I ran it for about 3 minutes on this drive... with just Sequential readings... It went from 450 MB/s, (again in 3 minutes of just reading), to 2 MB/s .... <-- Throttled Same with the writes... that was worse... from 400MB/s to 200KB/s <-- Crap drive and throttled Kinda long... but now you know importance of throttling... The samsung Pros do not throttle... i brought mine into work and ran the test before i put my OS on it... no throttling, and the drive self repairs itself as well as going faster on the long run.
