What is the TRIM Command and How Do I Enable it?

I guess you have all heard about Solid State Hard Drives. They are the newest storage device that have no moving parts, unlike the normal HDD that has spinning magnetic discs inside

When SSD’s came along we were all excited, that was until some vital flaws were exposed.

Both drives, the HDD and the SSD do not actually remove the content from the disk when you delete data, it only deletes the pointer to the address where the file is stored. This is why such programs exist like “secure delete” which will overwrite the deleted data with random stuff so no one can access this again. But there lies a problem as a SSD only has a limited number of writes and each one can degrade the drive. If the drive knew which areas of memory didn’t contain any important data, it could simply re-use it for new data.

These problems also mean that you should not defrag a SSD because essentially defragging would degrade the drive and reduce it’s lifespan. Manufacturer’s realized this problem and came up with a way to optimize the drive and some added garbage collection to the controller. See more about garbage collection and TRIM. (link to The SSD Review.com)

So What is TRIM

The TRIM command is issued based on the findings of the garbage collection. After TRIM has done the job the operating system can notify the SSD about data blocks that are no longer in use so that they can be wiped.

Make Sure TRIM is Enabled

1. Go to the start menu.

2. Type in cmd.exe into the search box.

3. When you see cmd.exe right click on it and run Command Prompt as an administrator.

4. When your cmd window appears type in:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

5. In the results, if a 0 appears then this means that TRIM is enabled. If a 1 appears, that means that it is not enabled.

How To Enable TRIM

To enable TRIM you need a TRIM compatible SSD and you need to be running Windows 7 as TRIM does not work on previous versions of Windows.

If you qualify then all you need to do is go to the CMD window again and type in:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

TRIM Command Notes:

If you have an older version of Windows, TRIM is not supported. It is only supported for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Linux.

You could plug your SSD into a Windows 7 computer to take advantage of TRIM command.

TRIM does not always work in with RAID environments because current RAID drivers generally will not support it.

This is just one of the ways to optimize your SSD.

Further Resources:

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/09/14/verify-that-trim-is-enabled-in-windows-7/

http://lifehacker.com/5640971/check-if-trim-is-enabled-for-your-solid-state-drive-in-windows-7

http://lifehacker.com/5803331/how-to-enable-trim-on-your-macs-solid+state-drive