Reader Feedback: “WORTH it. My drive (SSD) is back and so is my productivity”
Andres R writes:
I just wanted to let you know that I resisted paying $40 for a few days, but I knew my external SSD’s performance had gone down the drain.
Sadly, other than on your site, there was little about this anywhere. Most people seems to just be happy with their drives. I’m a photographer and use the drive for intermediary photoshop work. In any case, one hour after paying my money, it was WORTH it. My drive is back and so is my productivity.
Details: LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt Series 120GB Solid State Drive used as an external drive via Thunderbolt. I was down to 19 MB/sec a second for writes and it is now back up to the 300-350+ range.
MPG: the DiskTester recondition command is designed expressly for SSDs. Not all SSDs benefit, but many types do.
At the least it clears out data to zeroes, perhaps easing the load on the SSD controller as it shuffles data around internally. The dgl wipeFree command is also effective for similar reasons.
While the Apple SSDs in the MacBook Pro are generally quite good, a single recondition pass brought the minimum write speed up substantially (the first pass showed a big drop in performance near the end of the free space). This test on a late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina with a 512GB SSD about half full.