The Trim Command: Coming Soon to a Drive Near You

We run into these problems primarily because the drive doesn’t know when a file is deleted, only when one is overwritten. Thus we lose performance when we go to write a new file at the expense of maintaining lightning quick deletion speeds. The latter doesn’t really matter though, now does it?

There’s a command you may have heard of called TRIM. The command would require proper OS and drive support, but with it you could effectively let the OS tell the SSD to wipe invalid pages before they are overwritten.

The process works like this:

First, a TRIM-supporting OS (e.g. Windows 7 will support TRIM at some point) queries the hard drive for its rotational speed. If the drive responds by saying 0, the OS knows it’s a SSD and turns off features like defrag. It also enables the use of the TRIM command.

When you delete a file, the OS sends a trim command for the LBAs covered by the file to the SSD controller. The controller will then copy the block to cache, wipe the deleted pages, and write the new block with freshly cleaned pages to the drive.

Now when you go to write a file to that block you’ve got empty pages to write to and your write performance will be closer to what it should be.

In our example from earlier, here’s what would happen if our OS and drive supported TRIM:

Our user saves his 4KB text file, which gets put in a new page on a fresh drive. No differences here.

Next was a 8KB JPEG. Two pages allocated; again, no differences.

The third step was deleting the original 4KB text file. Since our drive now supports TRIM, when this deletion request comes down the drive will actually read the entire block, remove the first LBA and write the new block back to the flash:


The TRIM command forces the block to be cleaned before our final write. There's additional overhead but it happens after a delete and not during a critical write.

Our drive is now at 40% capacity, just like the OS thinks it is. When our user goes to save his 12KB JPEG, the write goes at full speed. Problem solved. Well, sorta.

While the TRIM command will alleviate the problem, it won’t eliminate it. The TRIM command can’t be invoked when you’re simply overwriting a file, for example when you save changes to a document. In those situations you’ll still have to pay the performance penalty.

Every controller manufacturer I’ve talked to intends on supporting TRIM whenever there’s an OS that takes advantage of it. The big unknown is whether or not current drives will be firmware-upgradeable to supporting TRIM as no manufacturer has a clear firmware upgrade strategy at this point.

I expect that whenever Windows 7 supports TRIM we’ll see a new generation of drives with support for the command. Whether or not existing drives will be upgraded remains to be seen, but I’d highly encourage it.

To the manufacturers making these drives: your customers buying them today at exorbitant prices deserve your utmost support. If it’s possible to enable TRIM on existing hardware, you owe it to them to offer the upgrade. Their gratitude would most likely be expressed by continuing to purchase SSDs and encouraging others to do so as well. Upset them, and you’ll simply be delaying the migration to solid state storage.

Free Space to the Rescue Restoring Your Drive to Peak Performance
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  • Natfly - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link

  • DangerMouse4269 - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - link

    Nicely written. Even a very out of practice Comp Eng understood that.
  • geekforhire - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link

    I have just replaced the hard drive in this 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 notebook computer with a new and very quick OCZ SSD, manually configured the partition with a 1024 offset, freshly installed the OS, freshly downloaded all of the latest and greatest drivers from Dell, and applied all currently available OS updates from Msft.

    The problem is that when the machine resumes from Standby, it will /reliably/ (4 out of 4 attempts) produce a BSOD 0xF4 after the power button is pressed to resume the machine from standby.

    Here's the sequence to recreate the problem:

    0) Machine is booted normally into Windows, and log in to an account which has administrative privs.
    1) Click on Start -> Shut Down -> Standby.
    2) See display turn black, disk I/O light flashes then stops, then the power indicator light begins to flash on and off slowly.
    3) Wait until the power light has made 2 slow flashes.
    4) Press the power button.
    5) See the Dell Bios splash screen, then disappear
    6) Boom: See the BSOD 0xF4

    The values reported after the STOP are:
    (0x00000003, 0x865b3020, 0x865b3194, 0x805d2954)

    Note that I've been in contact with OCZ before about this SSD+computer, because the previous BSOD that was produced was 0x77. Their recommendation was to create the partition with an offset with a 64 interval, and to reflash the SSD with their modern firmware. This was done, the OS was reinstalled as described, and now I'm getting a different BSOD code. Another mention was a question whether the notebook computer uses a SATA2 controller (definitely compatible) or SATA1 (which may have troubles).

    I've run Spinrite on the SSD, and there are lots of ECC errors being reported. I've been in contact with Spinrite, and they chalk this up to the SSD being chatty (which they like), but since SSD's are new and magnetic disks are common, they want to stay focussed on magnetic disks.

    When the machine boots back up, the OS reports that a serious error has occurred, and asks that a problem report be submitted, which I do. Then an attractive but somewhat generic page is displayed with common causes (Aging or failing hard disks, large file transfers from secondary media to local hd, loss of power to a hard drive, hard disk intensive processes (eg: antivirus scanners), recently installed hardware that might have compatibility and performance problems)

    Has anyone else encountered this kind of problem, and do you have any suggestions?
  • angavar - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link

    As a medical student I can appreciate a well researched and analytical article when I see it. This is by far the best computer hardware review I have ever read! Thank-you for your time and effort in producing what is clearly a thoroughly researched and detailed analysis.
  • mac021 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link

    Thank you for the lesson and helping me understand SSD drives. May I just ask for your advice...

    For everyday use designing and generating prototypes for websites and running typical office s/w like word and excel for long documentations while listening to music or just having some video play in the background, then the occasional gaming of, say Star Craft 2 and Dead Space 3, and lets assume I do this on a 5 hours a day average for 365 days in a year, how long before I need to replace an OCZ Vertex/Summit SSD? And does format/reinstall help in prolonging the life of an SSD just as it does for my old hard drives (from a computer that's 6 years old and counting)? Or there's no stopping the SSD's death after reaching 10,000 times of being erased and rewritten on? I'm not one who keeps upgrading or buying new computer systems for every new thing that comes out, i'm more of a keeper and maintainer for as long as the system servers my needs... but when I make a purchase, I make sure it will be enough to last me another 6-12 years IF possible! Which is why I'm still considering SATA for my next purchase late this year or early next year (and I'm only buying a new PC just because I made a mistake buying a foxconn motherboard that can't support anything higher than XP, not even Vista... weird, anyway I found that out too late).

    Also, would you know of a motherboard that supports SSD, Windows 8, Nvidea, third gen i5/i7, and up to 64GB ram?

    Thanks so much!
  • windows10 - Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - link

    This article is meaningfull, interesting. thank you for sharing
  • susanbones - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link

    I was wondered to these many responses here.

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