SSD Performance: TRIM And Firmware Updates Tested
Solid state drives can deliver exceptional performance, but they're not necessarily fire-and-forget upgrades. You'll only really get the best possible experience from them if you pay attention to details like TRIM support and available firmware updates.
Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage App Loading, Gaming, Video Editing
Application loading performance reaches 118 MB/s on a fresh 470-series SSD with the older 0601 firmware with TRIM enabled. The two other results after our torture testing are 99 and 98 MB/s, which means that the drive shows a performance impact due to the significant workload and still achieves 84% of its initial performance. However, running the exact same scenario without TRIM would put the drive back to 84 MB/s in a clean state and 62/64 MB/s after the torture testing. Clearly, TRIM makes quite a difference.
The new firmware turns out to be a real game changer, as the drive goes up to 141 MB/s with the 0701 release. The performance level to which it drops after the torture test is 127 MB/s, or 90%, which means that overall performance, as well as TRIM efficiency have improved. But even if TRIM is switched off, the drive recovers faster from the torture test after our 30 minute idle period.
The gaming results are similar, but the differences are less significant.
In the video editing test, the new firmware doesn’t improve maximum performance, but it has a very positive impact by making the drive more resilient against our torture testing.
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