New Erase and Zero out sectors option in SL?

[Qusus]

Hey, did anyone else notice that if you boot the SL disc from the DVD and go into disk utility, there is an option to Erase and Zero out sectors?

I'm just wondering if this solves the performance degradation issue of SSD's over time. Has anyone tried it and benchmarked the results before/after?

In theory it seems like it would work (albeit at the penalty of losing all data on the SSD).

 

[alphaod]

No those have always been there; still does the bit-by-bit wipe that writes zeros to each cell sequentially. Many SSDs have cells that are reserved to replace other bad cells, and in this case those reserve cells cannot be accessed. The SSD Secure Erase function is a command that causes all cells to be erased in parallel; so insteead of say 50 minutes for the zero wipe, it should only take 2 minutes via the ATA erase command. This also accesses the reserved cells and writes those to zero.

 

[Qusus]

No those have always been there; still does the bit-by-bit wipe that writes zeros to each cell sequentially. Many SSDs have cells that are reserved to replace other bad cells, and in this case those reserve cells cannot be accessed. The SSD Secure Erase function is a command that causes all cells to be erased in parallel; so insteead of say 50 minutes for the zero wipe, it should only take 2 minutes via the ATA erase command. This also accesses the reserved cells and writes those to zero.

Ahh I see. So if I'm understanding you correctly, doing this will not in fact restore the SSD's performance to the "new" state, and in fact seems like it would actually hurt performance because it's actually writing on all those cells?

Thanks for the info.