As per recent isdct/intelmas/sst? The web site?
Yes. It's all "Solidigm" now, which has made information harder to find and firmware harder to get, but these drives aren't exactly getting regular updates at this point.
Exactly. "isdct" more or less became "intelmas", and post-separation Solidigm offers "sst". I mention this since I encountered someone at Cephalocon who was puzzled why intelmas wasn't applying the known-latest revision: he hadn't known about "sst". For drives that old, I would think that one intelmas release or the other would contain the blobs.
Newer SSD controllers / models are better than older models at housekeeping over time, so the secure-erase might freshen performance.
I mean... I don't have much else to try, so I may give it a shot! My only hesitation is that there's not really any problem indicator I could check afterward. So I don't know how I would tell if it made a difference unless I did them all and then the problem went away.
There's an obscure "localpool" concept where you can define a pool for testing that lives only within a single failure domain. Naturally this would be rather inadvisable for production, but you might create a localpool containing say 3 secure-erased drives and another containing 3 as-is drives, and run the bench against both. That wouldn't take nearly as long. It's not unusual for SSD manufacturers to recommend a secure-erase after any firmware update. Probably most of the time it isn't really important, but ya never know. When I worked with a certain manufacturer (ahem) to resolve a slippery workload-dependent firmware design flaw, this actually was important.
Which at the speed this thing rebuilds might well be a 3-month project. :-/
Thanks!