What is TRIM and Why Does Your SSD Need It? Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
407 words · ~2 min read
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this is kind of a random video so we thought we'd shoot it in kind of a random location I'm actually just
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lounging on the balcony outside my office my desk is on the other side of
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this wall so this balcony oversees the warehouse operations here at NC anyway I
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recently uploaded a video to my other channel where we took the cameraman's
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computer and we upgraded it with an SSD featuring trim and Windows 7 so I got a
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few messages asking me what exactly is trim and why did you emphasize so many
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times that that was important and that it was a key feature of Windows 7 well
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first of all Windows 7 is the only operating system right now that does
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feature trim support so there put that
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in your pipe and smoke it that's why it's important but that doesn't actually
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answer the question the question is what does trim do so here's what trim does I
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devised this um example trim is kind of
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like the insert key because normally with any SSD drive the performance is
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actually going to degrade as soon as you take that fresh never
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written flash memory and write over it once every time you try to write it's
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like this so even after you delete a file in clear space if you want to
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rewrite that H you actually have to delete it first which takes up one cycle
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and then you have to write to it after so it takes a lot longer what trim does
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is it's a way of the operating system telling your drive whenever you delete a
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file immediately hey that bit isn't there anymore so you
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can just write right over that so it clears it out right away so it's kind of
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like the insert key if I press the insert key and you know I want to write
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something over this well it helps if I type correctly
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then what it does is it enables you to
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write data without first removing it and it really increases the speed and the
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performance of your SSD especially over
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time now there are other Solutions like garbage collection but trim really is
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the most elegant solution because all you do is pop it into your system and
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forget about it keeps your SSD running in tiptop shape