OCZ's Vertex SSD receives background garbage collection

OCZ keeps pushing SSD technology forward with a new beta firmware for it's Indilinx Barefoot based drive.

One of the problems that have gone unsolved, until now, by the best products in the SSD market - Intel and Indilinx based parts - is the inability to de-fragment the SSD once you've given it some use. Most manufacturers will not encourage you to run a filesystem defragmentator as this will shorten the lifespan of the SSD. There is good reason to do so and it will not solve your SSD fragmentation problems, since filesystem and flash fragmentation are different problems - the filesystem can't help the SSD since it doesn't know it's internal flash structure.

Typically, a used SSD will be slower and will have it's top sequential write speed drop to less than half of what it was originally and sequential reads will also take a considerable hit. It will still kick an HDD's ass but will be slower then when you bought it.
OCZ has delivered a new beta firmware for it's Vertex SSD drives that performs background defragmentation of the SSD - meaning it will only do so when the drive is not doing any work - and can restore the drive to it's "as new" state in about half an hour, which is an excellent result.

For anyone who is on the market for an SSD drive, the Vertex will be the drive of choice for some time to come. Intel has released updated X25-M drives but they still don't feature this kind of features and do loose out to the Vertex in some tests, less the random writes test, which is still an Intel advantage.
Hop over to PC Perspective for the test.