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.
Why don't you dig through SMART indicators for harddrive.
It will definitely give you indicators
Again, have considered SSD optimization tweaks in linux
SSD TWEAKS FOR LINUX