I’m in love with my new computer. It’s really fast. That was the plan.
I spec’ed out all the components. That doesn’t mean I have a through understanding of all of them.
For instance, my boot and program drive is an SSD (solid-state drive). With no moving parts it’s light years faster than a conventional hard drive. That’s why the system boots in under 20 seconds!
The SSD comes with a companion program, Samsung Magician. I looked at it when the system was first installed, not since. It didn’t seem important. There was no indication the drive would change with age.
I fired it up today and was surprised to see my SSD had slowed in all categories! Random writes went from 70,159 I/O operations per second to 53,047 IOPS.
There are optimization routines listed within Magician. I tried those and installed a waiting firmware update to my drive.
Oh my!
Random write speeds are up over 100%! Other speeds are up too, though not as much.
Will I notice the difference? I’m not sure. Disk i/o is one factor of many, but it’s among the most important.