Long term of health of SSDs

Sorry, getting off topic: what he asked was will his raid 0 array slow as it fills and if so can it be fixed.

From the OCZ FAQ concerning raid 0 arrays and performance "OCZ SSDs feature built-in garbage collection to ensure optimal performance after time, and you can also create an image of your RAID array to be restored following a secure erase of each individual drive. Secure erasing each SSD and then recreating the array will allow for maximum performance."

As far as measuring performance, from the FAQ "To realize the full rated specifications of your drive, OCZ recommends using ATTO32 to test sequential Read/Write speeds, and IOMeter to test the IOPS. OCZ also provides read/write performance metrics using AS-SSD. Some benchmarks perform a large amount of read/writes to the SSD, and we do not recommend excessive benchmarking of your drive."

True you will get write amplification. In theory, under extreme worst case conditions that would reduce writes by a factor of 4x I would say. Actually doing that in practice is something else.

With modern SSDs, many have some remedial feature such as OCZ's garbage collector to recover from not having TRIM.

Also what I meant by the "damage not being permanent", I meant with respect to TRIM, write amp aside, you could apply TRIM to a drive after using it without TRIM to recover FULL performance.

Yes, I apologize. When I initially posted my one track mind was thinking only of memory life, while the question was memory life AND performance (pun there, AND, NOR, XOR...lame attempt at computer humor). You are correct, when trim and garbage collection get to do their thing (and they do it when your SSD is on and idle folks...after serious work performance declines, but if you leave the drive on then trim and garbage collection do their work, but the disk must be idle) then the disk recovers its initial performance although I would think at some point near 'end of life' there would be some degredation, but I do not really know. Performance reduction is fully recoverable. So taking the drives out of raid, putting them as ordinary drives allows trim and garbage collection to work, then you put them back into raid 0 with full performance restored. And excessive benchmarking equates to excessive writes which gets back to my first post concerning memory life only. Thanks Darth Shiv I think it's clear now.

Yeap no worries... nothing wrong with healthy discussion. Clearer on my end now too

You guys are great! Just the kind of specific details I was looking for, thank you Raoul Duke and Darth Shiv. I really understand what's going on much better now, and understanding helps me decide how to handle this RAID array.