phoenix 120 GB ssd (not pro version) has awful sustained writes

[Onslaught2k3]

As title says.. I'm having deplorable SSD performance sustained write-wise. I first was getting about 140MB/sec sustained write speeds as per crystaldiskmark and now the speeds have dropped to less than half (about 60MB/sec sustained write speeds). Everything else seems to be affected as well (4k random writes slower as well). Is there anything I can do to get the performance I used to have or am I stiffed? Will a reformat/repartition be necessary? 75.3 GB of 111 GB's worth of partitioned space is still available. I haven't installed any other AHCI drivers than the ones provided by AMD since I have a MSI 890fxa-gd70 motherboard.

[vaca]

Onslaught2k3,
Try to secure erase your SSD by this guide.
After secure erase your SSD, the performance will recover.
If you use Windows 7, keep its original AHCI driver.
I'm not sure the AHCI driver from AMD would support TRIM or not.

[Onslaught2k3]

I'm going to give it a few days to see if things improve. I enabled the native windows 7 driver now (registry tweaked msachi.sys and redownloaded native win7 version of the file) and had to get TRIM back on by simply running another windows experience index test manually. I also found out that perfectdisk has a "consolidate free space" function that supposedly helps performance. My sustained writes went up from about 60-70 MBps in the crystaldiskmark random data test (default) to 80-90 MBps. Though small, it is an improvement without having to wipe my entire disk. Thanks for the help though, vaca. it's good to know there's a surefire way of getting my performance back.

[Onslaught2k3]

Did the secure erase using gparted as you suggested and reinstalled windows with a 4KB prealign using diskpart in the command prompt provided by the setup disc for win7. The writes seem to degrade insanely when going past 30% capacity. That's just bad. I give up on SSDs altogether and will be going after a cheaper RAID configuration which is more robust.