Time to reformat my Vertex 3 SSD?

[guessoso]

120 GB Vertex 3 SSD. LEss than a year old.
Windows 7 Home premium installed.
Motherboard: z77x-UD3H

Drive is connected to the 6gb/s

I have my important data backed up. So I won't lose data. I don't have a recent image I can use, so I have to reinstall alot of stuff. It will be a major pain.

Response time has radically slowed down. When I try to copy files to another drive, I get literally 1.5 mb/sec copy speed. Just opening files is slow.

When I run a chkdsk, I get to 221,000 out of 265,000 on Stage 4 and then it hangs all night (So had to reboot. I know this is bad, but I have other boot drives).

I mainly use my SSD as a boot drive for fast bootup. I don't know if the drive is damaged and won't work. Is there anything I can try before reformatting and reinstalling windows? I have been getting windows 7 popups saying 'there is a problem with your drive', but no details. I also crash and reboot when I try to take an image backup of the drive (using windows 7 backup) after it runs for a while and it is very slow.

Anything else to look at? Is there a known issue with Vertex drives getting damaged/corrupted?

 

[Dereck47]

You should not reformat your SSD, you should Secure Erase it. A Secure Erase restores any SSD to fresh-out-of-the-box condition.

Also, update the Vertex 3's firmware to version 2.25 (if it is not on that version already).

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I agree with Dereck47

 

[guessoso]

how do i know what my firmware version is? if i secure erase will it revert back to the old version?

what is the difference between secure erase and format?

 

[Dereck47]

OCZ's Toobox will show you what version your drive is currently on.
http://ocz.com/consumer/download/firmware

Firmware versions are not affected by a Secure Erase or disk format.

A Secure Erase resets all of the cells in all of the NAND chips of the SSD.
The SSD becomes a blank drive, the same as it was when you unboxed it (assuming you bought it new).

A Disk Format prepares a drive for use by an O/S.

When you S/E a SSD it still needs to be formatted before it can be used.
If the SSD is going to be used as a secondary/storage drive then you have to manually format it.
If the SSD is going to be used as a boot drive then Windows will automatically format it during the installation process.