In a few words, we could define TRIM as the technology that allows the SSD to more efficiently manage the space occupied by the data. If you have begun to comb gray hair or still use a computer that uses a mechanical hard drive, you know that it is necessary to regularly defragment the hard drive so that the system puts all the data it stores in its place and in an orderly manner.
In this way, when we need to open a file or search for information, time is reduced necessary to access it since all the corresponding stored physical data is in one place and not scattered on the hard drive.
What is TRIM used for?
The goal of this technology is improve write performance on SSD drives. TRIM tells the storage drive what files it has stopped using so it forgets about them and doesn’t waste time copying them to new locations when it needs to free up space. This improves write performance by avoiding internal write operations that are not needed.
The use or not of TRIM on a solid-state drive does not affect its durability. Most SSD manufacturers include drive wear analysis systems so that, before they completely stop working, they allow the user to look for a replacement in time.
On SSD storage drives, once a sector is written, it cannot be rewritten until complete an erase cycle, an erase cycle that is much slower than the write processes. In this way, if we modify a part of the file, the new data must be written to a newly deleted block.
TRIM technology is a mechanism that tells the drive which sectors can be safely erased, doing this process in the background instead of doing it when we want to write new data to the drive.
Advantages and disadvantages
The main advantage offered by this technology is found in the performance increase of solid-state hard drives (SSDs). Although Windows activates this technology in SSD drives natively and without the user having to do anything at all, we must periodically analyze the computer to optimize its operation, if we have programmed the operation of this function.
If we stop to think carefully, TRIM technology doesn’t really have no disadvantage beyond that related to the operation of SSDs. If we deactivate it, the performance of our unit will be considerably reduced.
Unlike traditional mechanical hard drives, in which information stored on a drive is accessed by a head, SSDs are nothing more than memory chips, chips that, over time, they wear out and lose speed both reading and writing.
Disable TRIM of an SSD in Windows
The first thing that we must be clear about if we want to deactivate the TRIM in an SSD is that information stored inside will be unrecoverable in case the unit stops working. Due to the way this technology works, we will not be able to recover the data even using professional recovery software.
Considering that most users use a cloud storage platform to sync important data from their computer, turning off TRIM on an SSD shouldn’t be a problem if the storage drive stops working. We will only have to worry about buying and replacing the SSD to be able to continue working.
As I mentioned above, Windows natively activates TRIM on all SSD drives that a computer has accessible. Before deactivating it, we must check its status using CMD with administrator permissions with the following command:
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify
If the values NTFS NTFS DisableDeleteNotify and
ReFS DisableDeleteNotify show the value 0, it means that TRIM is activated. If we want to disable TRIM, we must use the command that I show you below:
fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 1
Finally, we must close the CMD window with the command exit and restart the computer.
