Performance Degradation Testing
The purpose of this test is to see how much performance you can expect to lose from each SSD over time. Our test consists in testing the drives in their clean unused state first, and then run the HD Tach full benchmark several times, which fills the entire drive. This simulates heavy usage and gives us a good indication of how the performance will be affected once the SSD is in use.
The Intel X25-M drops quite a bit of read performance in CrystalDiskMark once full. The Samsung and Indilinx based SSDs do not appear to be affected yet.
Looking at write performance we see that the Corsair P struggles quite a bit, dropping over 20% of its original performance. There was again little to no impact seen when using the Indilinx SSDs.
The random 4KB read test had the Intel X25-M see the greatest drop in performance, while the Samsung and Indilinx SSDs only dropped a few MB/s.
When running the 4KB write test the Intel X25-M's performance was almost halved (while still remaining the fastest drive). The Indilinx SSDs also saw significant performance reductions. The Corsair P Series performance drop wasn't as bad but then again it was already much slower than Indilinx SSDs.