What is SSD Trim?

[Raijin]

So I was watching Linus's gaming Pc 2015-2016 update again, and I heard him say something about his older SSD deteriorating over time and now that he go intel's 1.2tb SSD he said he won't have this problem because of it having "Trim support".

What is Trim? How do I know if a SSD supports Trim?

[demonix00]

He already did a video on that.

[Godlygamer23]

Trim is a command sent out by the operating system that tells the SSD to clear all memory marked as "free" by the OS. The reason why this needs to be done is that SSDs write data differently compared to a hard drive.

 

First, you must understand that when a file is deleted, it's not really "deleted." It's marked as free by the operating system(as mentioned above). Every time the SSD needs to write to an area with stale blocks already present, it must remove the data, and then write the new data. As you can imagine, the process can get to be very long when writing a lot of data at one go, and that's consuming two cycles for one bit, instead of the normal one cycle.

 

Trim will tell the SSD to remove all of the stale blocks present to ensure that the drive will typically always be able to write at full speed as long as the drive is also sufficiently empty.

 

Typically, modern SSDs support Trim, but if you run a special scenario like RAID, the Trim support might be no longer existent. OSes also need to be able to support it, but applications made by manufactures can also send out the command for operating systems that do not natively support it. The OSes include, but are not limited to, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

[Raijin]

17 minutes ago, demonix00 said:

He already did a video on that.

 

Oh I didn't happen to find any.

4 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Trim is a command sent out by the operating system that tells the SSD to clear all memory marked as "free" by the OS. The reason why this needs to be done is that SSDs write data differently compared to a hard drive.

 

First, you must understand that when a file is deleted, it's not really "deleted." It's marked as free by the operating system(as mentioned above). Every time the SSD needs to write to an area with stale blocks already present, it must remove the data, and then write the new data. As you can imagine, the process can get to be very long when writing a lot of data at one go, and that's consuming two cycles for one bit, instead of the normal one cycle.

 

Trim will tell the SSD to remove all of the stale blocks present to ensure that the drive will typically always be able to write at full speed as long as the drive is also sufficiently empty.

 

Typically, modern SSDs support Trim, but if you run a special scenario like RAID, the Trim support might be no longer existent. OSes also need to be able to support it, but applications made by manufactures can also send out the command for operating systems that do not natively support it. The OSes include, but are not limited to, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

 

Thank you for this detailed explanation.