Zeroing out SDD to restore "freshness"?

[tim4321]

Hello,

I'm about to reinstall Windows soon, a friend of mine suggested for me to zero out my SDD as that will supposedly restore the drive's "freshness".

Is this correct? From what I recall when I first bought an SSD last year was to avoid writing on the drive so running a drive eraser to totally fill the drive doesn't make sense to me.

Appreciate any feedback, thanks.

 

[tokencode]

I would not do this as it would just put additonal wear and tear on th memory cells. SSDs manage where the store the data themselves and unlike a typical HDD, the data does not need to be sequential for good performance.

 

[sminlal]

Actually writing zeros to all the sectors is a bad idea. However there is a function called "data security erase" which will reset the wear leveling tables in the SSD to restore optimal write performance.

If you're installing Windows 7, you can also achieve the same effect by using the "Custom" install mode and first deleting all of the partitions on the SSD and then creating the one you want to install Windows into. This will issue a TRIM command for everything on the drive which will also reset wear leveling and restore optimum write performance.

 

[tecmo34]

^+1...

sminlal is correct. If you read pretty much any "benchmark" & the testing method, you will notice they state a "secure erase" was performed before running the test.