BURBANK, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/12/09 -- Let's face it, if you're going for speed, you're going for speed. If you buy a Corvette, a good part of the reason you're doing so is so you can open up that powerhouse and let it fly. You're not going to be too impressed if you take it out on a track, get it up around 90 and some automatic function you didn't know about suddenly applies the brakes or slows down the engine. In fact, you'd probably march straight back to the dealer and demand a refund, repair or modification.

One of the prime goals in computing has always been speed, as well. CPUs are constantly modified to process more instructions per unit of time -- and more efficiently. More memory is added so processes and programs load and run faster. As with the Corvette, it would be quite maddening to a system administrator to get a new machine up and running, only to have its instructions-per-second suddenly cut down, or have part of the memory blocked off, cutting down the performance their company just paid dearly for.

To a certain extent, hard drives have been such a "governor" on performance. Because they are the only element of a computer that is mechanical, it has been a constant engineering struggle to balance out hard disks with memory and CPU that are hundreds of times faster. Hence, the advent of flash drives (also known as solid state drives, or SSDs) is a considerable boon. Because flash drives are composed of electronic circuitry, they are many times the speed of hard drives and approach the speed of the computer's other electronic elements.

But it turns out that flash drives have an unseen element that unexpectedly slows them down. That element is, believe it or not, fragmentation.

Files are saved to flash drives by NTFS -- the same file system that saves data to hard drives. NTFS is optimized for hard drives but not for SSDs. Because of this, NTFS saves data to flash drives in such a way that free space is rapidly fragmented. This scenario causes write performance to degrade by as much as 80 percent within a month of normal use.

Flash drives also have a limited number of erase-write cycles, and increasing the occurrence of erases and writes wears out the SSD faster. The fragmentation of free space causes a greater number of erase-write cycles, thereby shortening the life of the drive.

To rectify this problem, a solution must be employed that optimizes free space on an SSD. When this is done, write performance is brought back to a high-speed level and kept there, and once the solution has been in operation a short time, the write-erase activity becomes substantially reduced. Performance is maximized, and the life of the drive is lengthened.

Don't put the brakes on your SSD performance. Make sure you employ an optimization solution to maximize your flash drive speed and performance.