Ssd full format vs quick

EDIT: One more thing... anyone simply explain to me what the devil this drive alignment stuff is all about? It's certainly got me vexed

Based on the old HDD format methods, the Full Zero Filling or Full Format would go through each and every byte on the drive and set it to zero. With Quick Format, all it does is remove the pointers and declare the space used as free space.

Full format is usually only required when you want data security (no one else tries to recover your old files) or checking for bad sectors (which shouldn't be a problem of an SSD). It wouldn't be advisable to full format an SSD as it introduces additional unnecessary wear, unless privacy is a concern.


Don't know about the drive alignment though....

A Full Format does NOT zero-write the entire partition!

It does exactly the same as the Quick format: zero-writing the first 20MB and i recall some space at the end, and writing new filesystem information afterwards. The Full Format will read every sector on the partition for clues of any bad sectors, so it knows this and can store them in a file $BadSect in the root of the drive. It does NOT zero-write all data.

So a full format is only for detecting bad sectors, SSDs dont have those so no reason (but also no harm) to do a full format.

You're right i have no way if this still holds true for Windows 7. But somehow i doubt they did what you suggested.

But actually this is unnecessary, just one command to the SSD will wipe all the mapping clusters that keep track of where data is actually being stored versus the mapped LBA cluster. Due to the SSD moving data this dataset can grow large whenever you're writing data non-sequentially. A simple 'master wipe' command can simply delete all mappings and the drive is at its factory performance level.

Also see:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?a [...] pert&pid=6

XP puts the partition at 31.5KiB
Vista/Win7 puts the partition at 1024KiB or 1MiB.

This is not yet perfect since with flash cell blocks of 640KiB you still have a (minor) misalignment. Also RAID5's can have a misalignment with this 1MiB offset, for example a 4-disk RAID5 with 128KiB stripesize will have a full stripe block of (4-1) * 128KiB = 384KiB, which is still a misalignment with 1024KiB offset.

But the issue is either resolved or less severe now, so Vista/Win7 is an improvement in this regard.

Checkout the link posted above (or here: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?a [...] ert&pid=6)

It lists what the reviewer used and did to wipe the Intel X25-M. Especially, the older version does not work. The page lists a download link to a version below which does work with the X25-M.

Hope this is of help.

Note just in case: by using HDDErase it does exactly that: wipe all data; or actually the special mapping areas (HPA) that keep track of where data is actually being stored on the SSD. With this information wiped, the drive is like as it left the factory, just with some random data on the surface but with 100% performance level.

Using the new firmware available for X25-M, the issue of degrading performance is pretty much fixed. So usage of HDDErase is not really required, though it can be useful and the suggestion of windows using it whenever formatting a disk is a good one, because that would also reset the drive's performance level to factory conditions.