To maximize the life of a flash disk or SSD storage card, TRIM is supported in Windows 7. TRIM reduces the frequency of writes and flushes on USB flash disk or SSD Card, this will also effect and improve performance and efficiency of your flash disk or SSD storage card/disk. It is important to understand that TRIM only improves performance when you delete files. If you are overwriting an existing file, TRIM doesn’t help and you’ll get the same write performance degradation as without TRIM. Windows Server 2008 R2 also supports TRIM feature in addition to Windows 7.
By default when a solid state drive is present, Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching. Since these technologies are all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck.
Also see : Tweak and Boost Windows 7 slow speed & performance using SSDs and Speed up windows 7 performance with easy tips and tricks BiGGTech
SSDs which support TRIM Command
All new and next generation SSD should support trim in their firmware, below is a short list of already supporting SSDs.
- Indilinx based drives (Barefoot, Patriot Torqx, OCZ Vertex firmware 1.40, OCZ Summit, SuperTalent SuperDrive ME firmware version 1819,OCZ Vertex Series SATA II 2.5″ SSD etc.)
- Believe Patriot Torqx (Not M28 version) and the OCZ vortex support TRIM
- Intel X25-M G2 drives support TRIM
- Formay PC166 Leopard W-Series solid state hard drive
- GSkill Falcon series support TRIM
- Samsung SSD PM800 drives w/the VBM24D1Q firmware
- Crucial latest SSD also support TRIM
Tips for Using SSDs
- Make sure your SSD disk is aligned; test with AS SSD utility, it should say 1024K – OK and not 31.5K – BAD.
- Set controller mode in BIOS to AHCI to enable NCQ and increase random read performance by a factor 10 (or 1000%). Without this, multiqueue random I/O performance would be castrated.
- Reserve space on the SSD (optional with TRIM) to increase performance and lower degradation over time.
- TRIM is not supported in RAID configuration for SSDs in Windows 7
How to Check if TRIM is enabled or supported for your SSD card
According to the Crucial User Forums – Is TRIM Running? to test if TRIM is enabled run “fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify” in an administrative command window. If it comes up as 0 then it is enabled.
Have a read of the comments of Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives and this Intel Community Forum for more info.
Detailed working of TRIM Command in Windows 7:
In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.
“As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear.
“Windows 7 requests the Trim operation for more than just file delete operations. The Trim operation is fully integrated with partition- and volume-level commands like Format and Delete, with file system commands relating to truncate and compression, and with the System Restore (aka Volume Snapshot) feature.”
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Article by Muzzammil Waheed
Founder of BiGGTech.com, tech enthusiast, develops in Microsoft technologies with interests in technology, science and gadgets