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It looks like the author was mining a particular sort of cryptocurrency which needs a lot of drive space. I guess he was trying to squeeze as much performance out of his SSDs as possible.

For most applications I can't see why you'd really need to update your SSD firmware, unless the manufacturer messed up their wear-levelling or something like that in the release firmware.

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Just to give you an example: Some Samsung SSDs have slightly strange TRIM behavior that basically seems to get unnoticed during normal workloads.

But when you build a Hackintosh with a recent version of macOS this exact TRIM behavior results in boot times of several minutes (compared to a dozen of seconds or so on a SSD with a better TRIM implementation).

I’m not saying Samsung will ever fix their TRIM implementation, but in theory this would be fixable by a firmware update.

And don’t get me even started on the crap that TRIM is, why we shouldn’t need it in the first place, and how convoluted its development was.

I can’t imagine firmware updates providing tangible performance gains aside from critical issues (which may affect performance). I just don’t think it’s really in the interest of these manufacturers to invest in R&D to improve an already existing and purchased product, as lame as that is.

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