OCZ has announced a new firmware for its Solid State Drives of the Vertex family. Together with Indilinx, that developed the flash memory controller, it has come up with a new beta firmware that will “clean” the memory cells. The problem spawns from the fact that memory cells, that stores the data of Solid State Drives, become filled with garbage data, which forces the memory controller to rewrite the whole memory cell when data is stored, which could result in noticeable performance hits.
Windows 7 with its TRIM technology will limit the problems of fragmented flash cells but while waiting for TRIM OCZ has released the beta 1585 firmware for the Vertex series, which operates in the background with cleaning up the memory cells. A bit like Corsair’s solution with Samsung’s NAND flash memory controller.
At HotHardware and PC Perspective they have tested the new firmware and the results clearly shows that there are significant improvements after longer periods of use thanks to the new garbage cleaning technology. This is even more important with the RAID-based SSD, which OCZ has a couple of.
Background garbage collection / block data realignment will be vital to OCZ’s future offerings such as Colossus, which will place multiple Indilinx controllers behind an integral RAID solution. OCZ are definitely on their way to producing an excellent firmware for their Indilinx-controlled Vertex line of SSDs. – PC Perspective
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