If you’ve recently purchased an SSD you should probably be aware of performance issues that arise over time when it comes to writing data. TRIM technology was designed to make sure your drives write performance is consistent throughout the life of the drive. What is TRIM?
Windows 7 supports TRIM natively and you probably wont need to mess around with it. However if you want to check if TRIM is turned on or off use the following command:
C:>fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify DisableDeleteNotify = 0
0 – TRIM is enabled
1 – TRIM is disabled
Windows 7, for example, will query the drive’s RPM and if it responds with 0, it assumes the drive is an SSD. It then turns on TRIM and disables disk defrags as they are no longer needed.
If your system reports TRIM as disabled you can enable it by setting the property to 0:
C:>fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 DisableDeleteNotify = 0
… or if you want to showcase TRIM vs. No-TRIM:
C:>fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify 1 DisableDeleteNotify = 1
If you’re in the market for an SSD, remember you get what you pay for, so if that drive is relatively cheap make sure it supports TRIM. Also keep in mind that not all operating systems support TRIM, some may need patches and some may not support it at all for the time being.
Performance improvement is significant when deploying or capturing on an SSD, I highly recommend this upgrade to your lab environment.