OCZ, Indilinx Develop Garbage Collecting SSD Firmware

From DailyTech: SSDs have a few disadvantages when compared to traditional hard drives. One of those disadvantages is the price of the SSD compared to the price of a HDDs. Another of the disadvantages is the comparatively low storage capacity of SSDs today.

Yet another issue is that as SSDs have more and more files stored on them, some of the data becomes orphaned and takes up space on the drive reducing performance. As you can imagine reading the data in the cell, combining the data with new data going to the cell, and then writing the new data back to the cell adds to the time the SSD needs to complete write operations. This problem is especially time consuming when a drive is older and has had numerous files written to and from the drive.

To help reduce this sort of performance degradation, OCZ and Indilinx have collaborated on a new firmware for OCZ Vertex SSDs that will help to remove the garbage data on the SSD to improve performance as the SSD ages. OCZ will be releasing new firmware for all of its Vertex series SSDs that will actively collect garbage data on stored in the cells of the SSD during times when the drive is idle.

HotHardware tested a drive with the new firmware briefly and found that the firmware does indeed improve performance. The publication used the ATTO disk benchmark tool to run performance tests on a new drive, then a dirty drive, and then a SSD that uses the new firmware and found that the firmware dramatically improves performance with file transfers below 1MB.

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