An interesting article appeared in CNET/Macfixit a couple of days ago about maintaining SSD drives, in particular those fitted to the new MacBook Pros. It draws attention to the technical reasons for speed fall-off over time and what (if anything) one should do about it.
I dont know where to start, that article is full of errors and sweeping statements. not all SSD's are the same, and some not even close. I do Know that the controllers for the SSD's have to put up with OS commands directed at various lowlevels of rotational drives that make no sense to an SSD's which is why TRIM commands were suggested to OS makers in the first place.. The SSDs I know, (sandisk Micron and Supertalent) do all their own housekeeping, when it comes to block allocation internally, and never need to have the OS care about TRIM commands at all. so I suggest people wait until all SSD drives actually perform their own internal maintenance, and then the OS doesnt have to differentiate between storage objects, and merely treat them as space to use, and nobody has to worry about performance degradation. and as for fears about NAND flash wearing out, I once calculated that an 16 GB usb drive running at full theoretical speed of 480MB/sec writing out DVD after DVD after DVD full of changeable data, would take 173 years to BEGIN to show wear!!
However using an SSD as a boot and application drive can dramatically speed up the computer
My Mac Pro showed dramatic speed gains:
Boot time went from 122 seconds to 36 seconds,
Aperture start time went from 14 to 7 seconds
Time for Aperture to pass an image to Photoshop (including Photoshop initialisation) went from 42 to 9 seconds.
Euan Williams 