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Does the SSD really treat overwriting everything with zeroes as a low level format? I'm guessing "no", and that the entire test was performed on dirty disks.
by m_eiman 16y ago
Does the SSD really treat overwriting everything with zeroes as a low level format? I'm guessing "no", and that the entire test was performed on dirty disks.
- mkramlich 16y agothat struck me too. he pretty much said early on they were doing the tests on a used computer given to them by the vendor. a box that had previously been given to other reviews to test/review. therefore, I don't see how he can truly know for sure whether or just how clean/virgin that SSD is.
- m_eiman 16y agoNot only that, he explicitly filled the drive with zeroes using Disk Utility. He probably should have run HDDerase (or a similar utility from Samsung, if available) from a bootable USB stick to clear it instead.
- m_eiman 16y agoAs an aside, the SSD firmwares -could- detect pages filled with ones or zeros and use that knowledge to transparently do a "TRIM light", at the cost of doubling the size of the "block in use" bitmap (to track 'free', 'in use', 'all zeroes', 'all ones') and added code complexity. For the SSD makers it probably isn't worth the effort and debugging, since TRIM support is well on its way to ubiquity. Should be an interesting experiment though, if nobody has done it yet.