The article is a bit misleading on a number of levels.
DuraWrite is not an OWC technology. It was developed by Seagate and is used in some SandForce SSD controllers. It's not just OWC SSDs that use it; SSDs from some other vendors use it as well.
It does indeed help write performance on drives without TRIM, that is true. DuraWrite compresses data that are stored on the SSD, but marks the full (uncompressed) amount of space as being in use. For example, say you have a 10 MB file. You save it to disk. It is compressed on save down to 8 MB. But it still takes up 10 MB on the disk. The additional 2 MB is made available for garbage collection, so that garbage collection is more efficient. Result: with more space available for garbage collection, the drive performs nearly as well as if you have TRIM enabled.
But, if you
read the technical documentation from LSI (which also makes SSDs that use Sandforce controllers and DuraWrite), you see that if you have DuraWrite and you use TRIM, performance of the SSD increases dramatically. DuraWrite is not a replacement for TRIM; it's an adjunct to TRIM.
DuraWrite also doesn't work well on data that don't compress well. If you're doing something like shooting digital video, DuraWrite won't benefit you a whole lot--DV files are already compressed and don't benefit from further compression. So it's a bit weird to me that the OWC article explicitly mentioned digital video as a use case for DuraWrite.
