Do SSDs performance degrade over time?

Just looked at the performance of my Crucial MX200 500Gb SSD and tested last year it was about 10 mb/s faster on sequential read using Crystal Disk Mark 32 bit. Tested again using Crystal Disk Mark 64 bit and it is slightly slower. Is it the OS difference or is the SSD performance degrading over time?

I cant say i have noticed on mine, one of them is nearly 4 years old and still goes like the clappers. Presumably you mean 10MB/s, if not i wouldn't worry about 10mb/s, it's neither here nor there. That said in the real world and not in a benchmark i doubt you would notice a 10MB difference.

All HDDs tend to degrade over time as the disk fills up (all those lovely bloated updates). Best option is to run CCleaner with appropriate settings for each user, and look to optimise the system in general.

Many services / scheduled tasks come on board over the life of a computer (e.g. Google Toolbar updater, Adobe updater, Java Updater), and these will run on startup unless disabled. Most scheduled tasks are non-essential. Many services likewise, but subject to individual users' needs.

In addition, if running the indexing service , as the disk content grows, the indexer has more to cover. Personally, I have never needed it.

Reducing the number of system restore points / overall allowed capacity frees up disk space.

Lastly, with SSDs it's worth running SSD optimisation tools, such as TRIM, periodically.

Thanks for the advice all.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

All HDDs tend to degrade over time as the disk fills up (all those lovely bloated updates). Best option is to run CCleaner with appropriate settings for each user, and look to optimise the system in general.

Many services / scheduled tasks come on board over the life of a computer (e.g. Google Toolbar updater, Adobe updater, Java Updater), and these will run on startup unless disabled. Most scheduled tasks are non-essential. Many services likewise, but subject to individual users' needs.

In addition, if running the indexing service , as the disk content grows, the indexer has more to cover. Personally, I have never needed it.

Reducing the number of system restore points / overall allowed capacity frees up disk space.

Lastly, with SSDs it's worth running SSD optimisation tools, such as TRIM, periodically.

Non of that advice is really applicable to an SSD apart from the getting the drive trimmed and Windows will automatically recognise an SSD and do it every 2 weeks on its own accord. An SSD will only slow down on writes if it is nearly stuffed to the gills and the OS is starting to struggle to find blocks to write to.

This is correct; but there's also the spare cells factor on SSDs...

Basically, most SSDs nowadays are created with a whole bunch of spare memory cells. For example, your 480GB SSD might actually have a total of 512GB of raw flash, however 32GB of that is kept as spare. In time and usually depending on how often they're re-written, memory cells will degrade to the point that they cannot be used anymore. The SSD controller chip does its best to minimise this by spreading writes across as many cells as possible, but eventually they'll start to fail; at this point, the failed cell is marked as bad, and replaced by one of the spare cells.

Eventually (and for clarity, this is usually 5-10 years or more for a consumer drive in a typical consumer use scenario, so don't worry about it), there are no more spare cells, and the drive will either go into read-only mode, or just suddenly fail completely. Your operating system should warn you in advance about this, and it's also a good motivation to always have recent backups - for this and many other reasons.

What can you do to minimise the chances of this happening? Buy a larger drive, and/or don't fill your SSDs up to the brim. You shouldn't notice any performance issues if you do fill up more of it, but you're effectively shortening its life.

But honestly, don't worry about it - you'll most likely have upgraded / replaced the drive with a larger one or a whole new machine before this happens anyway.