Earlier last week OCZ released a new series of firmware for their SSD drives with Indilinx based controller. With the new firmware the entire line-up of Vertex and Agility Series SSDs can perform active garbage collection while the drives are idle to restore performance to like-new condition, even on a very segmented (slower) drive.

Typically, a used SSD will be slower and will have it's top sequential write speed drop to less than half of what it was originally and sequential reads can also take a considerable hit. It will still kick an HDD's as but would be slower then when you bought it.

The new firmware can restore the drive to it's "as new" state in about half an hour, which is an excellent result.

I decided to test this with an OCZ Agility SSD we use in one of our primary test PCs; the results are pretty sweet alright.

Before Garbage collection - take a good look at the write performance.

After 15 minutes Garbage collection - now observe that write performance is nearly close to maximum again.

We've been using this Agility drive in our primary test system for a while now. it has Windows 7 installed on it yet as you can see, wasn't fully fragmented just yet. However even with 15 minutes of garbage collection there's a very noticeable performance increase.

Nice job OCZ. OCZ new garbage collecting firmware's add a LOT more value to what were extremely good SSDs.

Firmware's and info can be found here.