I work on a product that is a headless Debian Linux system with removable Intel X-25M solid state drives. Recently we noticed that the read/write performance of these drives degrades over time, and sure enough the culprit was SSD block problems, as described here. So we did a secure erase of the SSD drive (as described here) and the SSD drives' performance is restored to its original/factory level.
Which is great, but what I'm wondering now is if there is some quick-and-easy way to query hdparm (or some other Linux shell command) so it will print out an indication of how badly degraded the SSD's block-structure currently is. If so, then I could add some logic to my own program to automatically notify the user when a secure-erase would significantly improve his system's performance. As it is, the user just has to sort of guess based on observed I/O performance compared to what it was previously... which isn't the end of the world, but it would be nicer if he just got a warning message "your data SSD is currently 35% scrambled, consider doing a secure-erase to get better SSD performance", or something like that.
