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Modern OS and SSD with TRIM
- Thread starter Zyklon808
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revenant
[H]F Squad Captain
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- Apr 10, 2005
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Windows 10 seems to have turned 'defrag' (disk optimization) into a trim task - it differentiates between spinners and ssds... You can set it to run weekly and it should clean things up.. It'll defrag spinners and run a trim cycle on ssds. Even seems to work on raid0 volumes. As for garbage collection I think it will vary from brand to brand, what type of controller and what it does.. I don't think you need to worry about that though as long as trim is running.
Simple explanation of garbage collection: it re-organizes data to minimize the number of partially filled blocks. Analogy time: your butler reorganizes the clothes in your suitcases so you have fewer suitcases to carry, and in the process throws away the clothes that you told him you didn't want anymore, but the butler is a knucklehead that can only find the clothes that you don't want anymore by sorting all the clothes from each suitcase to another suitcase.
Simple explanation of TRIM: it makes garbage collection more efficient and reduces writes to the SSD. Analogy time: A shark with frickin' laser beams attached to its head vaporizes the clothes that you don't want anymore before the knucklehead butler starts rummaging about in your suitcases.
There's two kinds of garbage collection: background and foreground. The background butler is the slow but steady sort, so he reorganizes your suitcases while you're not in the room with the suitcases so you'll be ready when you leave, but it turns out that the rest of your trip will be a tour of the Sahara desert and that dotty butler wasted his time organizing all the parkas and snowsuits and thermal underwear and bunny boots you were using during your previous stop in Siberia. The foreground butler, on the other hand, is the lazy sort who just sits around having a smoke until you get back, and when he finds out where you're going next, he hastily reorganizes your suitcases with only the desert gear; fortunately, the lazy foreground butler is also very quick and may possibly have taken a hit of adrenaline while you were pointing at the clothes you didn't want anymore, so he amazingly gets the job done by the time you turn around and walk out the door.
Modern SSDs are using foreground garbage collection because they are fast enough to do it and it reduces writes to the SSD.
The old Windows defrag tool was turned into Disk Optimization that sends sharks with frickin'... I mean, sends TRIM commands to SSDs in WIndows 8 and later. But before you say "because SSDs should never be deragmented", read this, because there are certain situations where an SSD does need to be defragged to avoid problems, and Windows 8.* and later handles this appropriately - but on a monthly basis, and even then only if it's needed, which it usually isn't.
Simple explanation of TRIM: it makes garbage collection more efficient and reduces writes to the SSD. Analogy time: A shark with frickin' laser beams attached to its head vaporizes the clothes that you don't want anymore before the knucklehead butler starts rummaging about in your suitcases.
There's two kinds of garbage collection: background and foreground. The background butler is the slow but steady sort, so he reorganizes your suitcases while you're not in the room with the suitcases so you'll be ready when you leave, but it turns out that the rest of your trip will be a tour of the Sahara desert and that dotty butler wasted his time organizing all the parkas and snowsuits and thermal underwear and bunny boots you were using during your previous stop in Siberia. The foreground butler, on the other hand, is the lazy sort who just sits around having a smoke until you get back, and when he finds out where you're going next, he hastily reorganizes your suitcases with only the desert gear; fortunately, the lazy foreground butler is also very quick and may possibly have taken a hit of adrenaline while you were pointing at the clothes you didn't want anymore, so he amazingly gets the job done by the time you turn around and walk out the door.
Modern SSDs are using foreground garbage collection because they are fast enough to do it and it reduces writes to the SSD.
The old Windows defrag tool was turned into Disk Optimization that sends sharks with frickin'... I mean, sends TRIM commands to SSDs in WIndows 8 and later. But before you say "because SSDs should never be deragmented", read this, because there are certain situations where an SSD does need to be defragged to avoid problems, and Windows 8.* and later handles this appropriately - but on a monthly basis, and even then only if it's needed, which it usually isn't.
Azrak
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2015
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- 1,114
I just ran defrag manually on my Win7 64bit system with Crucial m4 512GB SSD.
I built the system in May 2012 and never ran a defrag since it was built.
The defrag analysis said the drive was 52% fragmented. Seemed rather high.
Defragging took about an hour or so to complete and is now showing 0% fragmented.
So while it is a good idea to turn off defrag in Win7, HTFS will still become logically fragmented over time and you could run into problems if the tracking tables run out of space to handle the fragmentation.
I figure a defrag once every 3 years or so won't kill the SSD too much with "unnecessary writes".
I built the system in May 2012 and never ran a defrag since it was built.
The defrag analysis said the drive was 52% fragmented. Seemed rather high.
Defragging took about an hour or so to complete and is now showing 0% fragmented.
So while it is a good idea to turn off defrag in Win7, HTFS will still become logically fragmented over time and you could run into problems if the tracking tables run out of space to handle the fragmentation.
I figure a defrag once every 3 years or so won't kill the SSD too much with "unnecessary writes".