On Monday, when we published
our OCZ Vertex EX 120GB SLC solid state drive (SSD) review things started out great, but by the end of the review our benchmarking applications had clearly degraded the performance of the drive. The Vertex EX is not alone when it comes to the performance degradation issue as all SSDs face this issue. The root cause of the issue is that SSDs can write 4kb blocks at a time, but only delete 512kb blocks. This means that after the drive is used a read-erase-modify-write cycle is required instead of a simple write operation each time something needs to be written to the drive. Since SSDs cannot actually modify data without first deleting it you get the performance hit that many often talk about when it comes to SSDs.
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Source: Legit-Reviews