Quote: Third, there is NO performance drop as the drive ages. When it finally dies, based on what endurance testing on the sandforce controller has shown, it will most likely just panic lock and never be accessable again. Like all drives, keep backups and it shouldn’t be a problem.
I am sorry but this is wrong in this case. If you have two drives in a RAID TRIM isn’t working, therefore writing speed can decrease over the time. Furthermore in general writing to flash memory chips are getting slower the more often you write to it:
Wikipedia: “As a chip wears out, its erase/program operations slow down considerable.”
I am not sure if this also applies to the Toggle-NAND-Flash memory type SanDisk in the Extreme drives uses but I assume so.
