Does SSD Performance degrade over time? - And if so can we restore it?!

So here's an interesting one ive come across over the last few years of using SSD's - Performance degrading over time, ive noticed this where my drives dont quite hit the blistering speeds they used to or the manufacturer advertised speeds.

So todays candidate is an OCZ Agility 3 60GB in my HP Elite 8000. Now I had one of these drives when new a few years ago, although a 120GB one and the performance was blistering. OCZ advertise 525MB/s Read and 500MB/s Write and the drive always delivered.


So, go back a few days I had just got the machine installed and running properly with drivers, windows updates etc and I thought I would run a benchmark to update our benchmark thread, surprisingly the drive wasn't performing anywhere near as it should...


My first thought was lets get the OCZ software installed and see if there is a firmware update...


As expected the drive was on v2.13 of the Firmware and v2.25 was available. ALSO AHCI wasn't enabled by default in the bios of the HP for some reason!

I used the OCZ utility to make a bootable firmware update USB Flash drive and booted to it, updating the firmware. Ran a quick test and it was no different. As is commonly the case, enabling AHCI doesn't allow the machine to boot into windows after its already been installed. There may be a workaround for that, but as I hadn't installed any software yet I popped in the Windows DVD and just done a fresh install again, windows updates all completed, drivers all installed ran the tool again to make sure all was as it should!


AHCI was enabled, latest firmware applied, and also the HP was on the latest BIOS v1.14 (14/10/2015)...


Again much the same, slightly better in some areas, worse off in others.

So the question is where do we go next? anything left to try???

I never saw a SSD that hit up to the advertised speed...
like it says it CAN be UP TO under the perfect circumstances.

My OCZ Trion 150 is supposed to do 550 Read /520 Write...


I agree with you though, in general most get close but not always advertised figures!

Using Crystal Disk info will show the actual Performance of your SSD...
The small 64gb Crucial in my main machine has degraded, too.
It's now at 98%...