Impact of Idle Garbage Collection

The other option that Indilinx provides its users to improve used performance is something called idle or background garbage collection. The idea is that without any effort on your or the OS’ part your drive, while idle, will defragment itself.

The feature was actually first introduced by Samsung for its RBB based drives, but I’ll get to the issues with Samsung’s drives momentarily.

It either works by looking at the data on the drive and organizing it into a less fragmented state, or by looking at the file system on the drive and attempting to TRIM based on what it finds. Both Indilinx and Samsung have attempted to implement this sort of idle garbage collection and it appears they do it in different ways. While the end result is the same, how they get there determines the usefulness of this feature.

In the first scenario, this is not simply TRIMing the contents of the drive, the drive doesn’t know what to TRIM; it must still keep track of all data. Instead, the drive is re-organizing its data to maximize performance.

The second scenario requires a compatible file system (allegedly NTFS for the Samsung drives) and then the data is actually TRIMed as it would be with the TRIM instruction.

Details are slim, but the idle garbage collection does work in improving performance:

PCMark Vantage HDD Score New "Used" After TRIM/Idle GC % of New Perf
Corsair P256 (Samsung MLC) 26607 18786 24317 91%

 

Presumably this isn’t without some impact to battery life in a notebook. Furthermore, it’s impossible to tell what impact this has on the lifespan of the drive. If a drive is simply reorganizing data on the fly into a better (higher performing) state, that’s a lot of reads and writes when you’re doing nothing at all. And unfortunately, there’s no way to switch it off.

While Indilinx is following in Samsung's footsteps with enabling idle garbage collection, I believe it's a mistake. Personally, real TRIM support (or at least the wiper tool) is the way to go and it sounds like we’ll be getting it for most if not all of these SSDs in the next couple of months. Idle garbage collection worries me.

The Wiper Tool Early TRIM Support on Indilinx Drives
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  • Bonesdad - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link

    Been over a year since this article was published...still very relevant. Any plans to update it with the latest products/drivers/firmware? There have been some significant updates, and it would be good to at least have updated comparisons.

    Well done, more more more!
  • hescominsoon - Thursday, February 17, 2011 - link

    Excellent article but you left out sandforce. I'm curious if this was an oversight or a purposeful moission.
  • PHT - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link

    This article is fantastic, the best I ever read about SSD.
    Any follow up with new SATA III drives and new controllers like SandForce, new Indilinx etc.?
    I will be glad to see it.

    My Best
    Zygmunt
  • lucasgonz - Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - link

    Hello everyone.
    This post is quite old but I hope someone can answer.
    I am concerned about the life of my ssd (sandisk extreme 240). I performed partitions ignoring the issue of the level of wear and partitions. I have it for one year ago with a 30gb partition and one with 200GB. I wanted to use large drive for data but I did not have time for that and just use the first 30gb partition . My question is if the ssd may be damaged by using only a little segment. DiskInfo shows 10tb reading 18 tb and writing.
    sorry my poor English.
    Thanks for any help.
  • Ojaswin Singh - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link

    Hey,This is the most informative article i have ever read.Can You Please clear Out Some Of my Doubts:-
    1.Does Playing Video Games or Running Programs add to Writing on the SSD
    2.Is 1 Write Cycle=Filling 120GB of SSD once
    3.I really write on my HDD a lot(Seriusly a Lot) So how much life cycle can i expect from Samsung 840 SSD(Neither Pro nor EVO) I mean for how much time can i expect it to be writable
    Please Help me cause i want the speeds of SSD but i want it to last for me too
    Thanks,
    Ojaswin

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