Modern SSDs have a variety of tools and technologies that keep their performance from degrading quickly, but even so, even the most high-end SSDs are not exempt from seeing their performance decrease over time. If this degradation is not too urgent, we recommend that you wait, but if this decrease in performance is significant, follow the steps that we will show you below to bring it back to its original performance.
You should of course keep in mind that by doing what we are going to tell you here, you will lose all data on the SSD as it involves resetting it to factory settings, so you will need to take a backup first. Datas. so as not to lose your documents and data.
How to tell if your SSD is performing degraded
Before we get down to business, let’s check if your SSD is really performing as it should or if it is making it too slow for what it should, and for that there is nothing better than benchmarks. We recommend that you search the internet for a scan of your SSD model to find out what actual performance it should have, then run a benchmark such as ATTO Disk Benchmark to see how it performs now.
Speed will obviously vary between different SSD models, so we emphasize that what you need to do is compare the baseline performance your specific SSD should have with the one you currently have in order to assess if it is. degraded or not. If they only differ by a handful of MB / s, you shouldn’t worry and get to work, but if the performance difference is already over 100MB / s, it might be worth it. .
There will be occasions, in severely degraded SSDs, that the difference in performance is substantial and may even have been halved from what it should, and in this case it is certainly recommended and justified to wind up the blanket around the head to try to come back. at its original speed, so let’s see how to do it.
Recover the original speed of your SSD
Although each brand offers different software for the process which we will explain below, the basic concept is to perform a Secure Erase or Secure Erase of the unit. This process not only serves to delete all data from the device so that it cannot be recovered, but it also resets all memory cells to their original values and, unless you have cells already exhausted and unused, this would be the equivalent of returning the device to factory settings.
As we said, each manufacturer usually offers their own software for this, and below we leave you a list of the major manufacturers and their corresponding software so that you quickly have it on hand:
Obviously, to perform this erase process, you will need to connect the SSD as secondary storage on a computer; If you intend to do this with your system SSD, you will need to connect the SSD to another PC to be able to do this as obviously you will not be able to install and completely erase the SSD that the PC booted from.
If you don’t have this option, be aware that some modern motherboards include the ability to perform this secure erase process from the motherboard’s own BIOS. For example, on ASUS motherboards, you need to enter BIOS and go to the last tab, called Tool or Tools, where you can see the ASUS Secure Erase option.
This process, as we have indicated, allows you to erase the SSD even if it is the system storage device, but the problem is that not all motherboards have it built in, only the most modern ones. . Each manufacturer has their own way of doing this but the basics are the same, you just need to start the tool directly from the BIOS and follow a simple wizard that will guide you through the removal process.
Of course, the SSD must be connected to the PC and the BIOS must detect it (we say this because of the special configurations of some PCIe SSDs).
Once at this point, you will just have to select the SSD you want to erase and let the system do the whole process. As we mentioned before, besides erasing all the contents of the SSD and making it completely unrecoverable, this process resets the memory cells, after that you will have to reinstall the operating system or recover the backup that you have previously performed. .
After the system is installed, run the benchmark again (ATTO Disk Benchmark is recommended because it measures performance with different file sizes) and check how your SSD speed recovered multiple integers. There is a good chance, depending on the wear and tear, that you will not reach the values that the SSD had when it was brand new, but you will surely have recovered a good part of the lost performance.
