Guys, TRIM seemed to be working fine with the normal ASU endurance test and as Anvil highlighted it does not work with the enterprise test as the files are not deleted. With the SF drive TRIM occurred in one hit and once it executed all other instructions were ignored. (i.e. the drive locked up until the TRIM operation had finished). With the 830 the TRIM executions were comparatively ultra-fast and in some cases I noticed small TRIM operations whilst the drive was still writing.

Since I disabled AV the 830 has shown consistent performance. If I recall correctly the performance issues that Christopher experienced only occurred once the 177 decimal attribute exceeded 5,000. (?) At this stage the theoretical P/E count would have expired. I haven’t had a chance to look, but maybe the performance drop is related to reallocated sectors, program error fails etc?

Without knowing the relationship between data retention longevity and P/E cycles past the theoretical limit set by the NAND manufacturers I believe vendors are negligent in letting the SSD continue to write past a certain point. In my view the SMART data should trigger a warning that the drive will become read only once the P/E cycles gets close to a threshold where data retention to meet JDEC standards is jeopardised. After a grace period the controller should prevent further write activity.

That might sound a bit draconian, but the number one task for a storage device has to be data integrity, any thing else is a bonus.

My 2 cents.