Compressing an SSD

[Columbo]

Have not done it since I setup my RAID 0 with two 120GB SSD's. Does compressing an SSD make sense or does it hurt performance? I know defragmenting an SSD is a no no as it's solid state. 

[DeViLzzz]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ntfs-compression,3073-11.html

[Tie Lightning]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ntfs-compression,3073-11.html

That is very interesting...but when he says that it depends on what you are compressing, What happens if say a steam game gets compressed? Does it still work or no?

[Vitalius]

This is only true for sandforce based SSDs. Not all SSDs use compression this way.

You shouldn't compress data that lives on an SSD that already uses compression in it's controller. The SSD compresses everything that gets written to it by default, but doesn't tell you that so that it can have a longer life. It uses the sectors it normally would've used for data as backup in case other sectors go bad. 

Compressing data that goes onto an SSD means it won't be able to compress it anymore and will display the actual amount of storage space used & left. This gives you more space still, but increases the chance of you writing to a bad sector on your SSD by a lot. So it's a bad idea.

It's the same reason you don't defragment an SSD. It shortens the SSDs life, but in a different way.

If this is your SSD, then I wouldn't do it because it uses a SandForce controller. I'm not sure though because in your Sig & profile, your SSDs are Q series, but Q series doesn't have a 120GB SSD. Only 128GB. 

The actual Q Series uses Toshiba's controller, so you'd be fine doing it on those SSDs.

[Columbo]

It's a genuine Q Series 120GB drive in a RAID 0 configuration. HDTS212XZSTA. I have two identical drives. The performance on these Toshiba's is pretty good. At this point I still have 60GB's free without compression. With compression it would probably free up 10-20GB. I am in no rush because I have 2TB HDD drive array for everything else. I checked, I have the 128GB Toshiba Q Series. I was mistaken listing it as 120GB in my signature. 

 

Thanks for your feedback.