@ Rhys, bottom line is that synthetic benchmarks don't really mean jack with SDD's. It's user experience that matters and if your SDD's aren't being affected I wouldn't be too bothered with benchmark results. If your user experience is being affected the good news is that a quick format and re-image should get you back to full performance and it's much quicker than defragging a HDD, so no big deal

As far as I know Intel gave out HDDErase 3.3 to reviewers to enable them to format X-25-E after each test. They asked reviewers to format after each benchmark because benchmarks affect the way the Intel drives perform due to the way they adapt to usage. I don't know if HDDErase is the most applicable way to format on an OCZ drive, but I'm sure the guys at the OCZ forum could advice you.

@ lowfat, out of interest have you tried not running synthetic benchmark to see if a perceivable drop in speed occurs based on real world use? If so that would be concerning, if not does a in synthetic benchmark really matter?

I've seen relatively small drops in synthetic benchmarks on the X25-E's but absolutely no perceivable drop in real world use.