Computer Tips and Tricks
Intro
This is a collection of hopefully useful tips and tricks stemming from my work in IT support or dealing with computers in general.
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Restoring SSD and other Flash Memory Performance
The Problem
We have been living with all kinds of flash memory for years now, and in the same time memory density has steadily increased. Now you may occasionally have noticed symptoms of flash memory getting slower and slower over time – not always, not everywhere, but it does happen. It is the result of bit fading from charges bleeding off over time, which makes the job of error correction harder and harder if the contents are not explicitly being rewritten. We can assume that the severity of the issue is going to vary by flash maker, process node, type of flash (I would assume QLC and 2D TLC would be more critical than 3D TLC and MLC), existing number of write cycles and sheer luck of the draw.
Fundamentally, you can potentially encounter the problem in any kind of flash memory:
- SD and MicroSD cards
- eMMC storage (the infamous "Samsung eMMC disease")
- SSDs
I have seen major read slowdown and hiccups in a Samsung Pro Plus 256 GB MicroSDXC card after about 5 years (while its Transcend predecessor of half the size was still reading at full blast), as well as various mostly smaller OEM level SATA and NVMe SSDs (by e.g. Samsung and Toshiba), however I'm seeing signs of uneven read speed and hiccups on my near 5-year-old 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus as well (while my trusty old 850 PRO is reading stoically, as is a 1 TB Crucial MX500). Obviously the slower something is to begin with, the less margin it'll have before the slowdown becomes noticeable.
Automatic Workarounds
Now more sophisticated SSDs may be trying to counteract any such issues by performing regular rewrites in firmware – you may remember that Samsung got bitten by slowdown of stale data in the 840 series SSDs and didn't properly fix it until the 840 EVO series, so chances are they kept doing that for a few generations at least. So as long as the SSD was kept powered on, everything would be fine. The 850 PRO series with its MLC flash should have far fewer issues with this anyway.
Obviously this would not be an option for substantially "dumber" storage like SD cards.
Manual Fixes
The best way to restore flash memory to as close to new performance as possible: Format and TRIM it.
- With an SD card, that might amount to using the official SD association formatter. Formatting the card is the only time at which it is being TRIMmed.
- With an SSD, I would nuke it (e.g. "clean" in diskpart íf you're on Windows), create a new partition, fill it with zeroes and have the files deleted afterwards (e.g. "cipher /w:<drive:>\" until the 0x00 pass is through). A power cycle may be needed afterwards for the TRIM to take effect.
- With eMMC memory, you may be kinda SOL, unless you're some kind of wizard capable of unsoldering the chip and soldering it to something that converts it into an SD card.
If nuking all the data is inconvenient, I would suggest strategy number two: Rewrite all the data, TRIM empty space. Results probably won't be quite as good but it should still be quite effective.
Linux users can use some "dd" magic for this purpose, while for Windows I would suggest DiskFresh.
- For SD cards, rewriting should be sufficient, given that you can't explicitly TRIM them outside of a reformat anyway. It certainly helped my Samsung Pro Plus.
- For SSDs, I would rewrite and follow it up with a round of "cipher /w" to rewrite and then TRIM the empty space. A power cycle may be needed afterwards.
- For eMMC memory, there may be a way to set up the device from scratch and rewrite everything. Given that Android is just another Linux under the hood, it should also be possible to rewrite the storage device if you have root access (some dd magic taking device characteristics into account). This is a function that should ideally be integrated into the recovery bootloader.
Entry last modified: 2026-10-03 – Entry created: 2026-10-03