Trashbytes wrote on 2025-08-14, 10:01:

Ive had SSDs on non Trim capable systems die but NEVER from a lack of Trim.

Who said anything about dying? Lots of other problems arise.

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2025-08-14, 10:53:

tony359 wrote on 2025-08-14, 10:40:

Thinking about this, the box has software quotas for storage - which is set to 25GB at the factory, this gives you an idea of th […]
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Thinking about this, the box has software quotas for storage - which is set to 25GB at the factory, this gives you an idea of the amount of data expected! 😀
I will leave that quota to something like 100GB and the drive will never be full to the brink.

What I am not sure I understand is what the role of TRIM is. I understand that without TRIM the drive doesn't know what is deleted, is that correct? So how does the firmware garbage collection work if the drive doesn't know what needs to be deleted?

Back to the box, this morning I plugged the original PATA drive, 160GB, and observed the behaviour at boot. There is NO long "solid" activity after "Ready" appears. There is some activity but less than a second of "blink" so something is odd when a large drive is used.

I'm curious to see whether a 500GB SATA HDD shows the same behaviour. The SSD seems to be working fine for now. I see the light at the end of the tunnel - this project has taken all my energies for months now!

trim v garbage collection - https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/en/blo … -trim-explained

Yes. When people, like in this thread, and drive literature say stuff like "the drive will take care of it's own maintenance" they mean garbage collection, not TRIM.

tony359 wrote on 2025-08-14, 17:42:

So the trick is the "overprovisioning", the extra space that is "always empty". In fact, when I tested the Samsung SSD with Samsung Magician (what a horrible piece of SW!) it had an over provisioning option. I wonder whether it would be wise to reserve some more.

On topic of "overprovisioning" - if done right it is useful as it increases amount of empty space no matter what. On the other hand - this way you are unable to use all the space you paid for, so have to be reasonable...

If done wrong - it makes matters worse. Thing is - you have to be absolutely certain the space you are leaving unallocated is actually empty. Because if it is not you are making matters worse - it'll never be erased or used. Simply deleting or shrinking partition may not be enough, TRIM has to be sent and if OS does not do it when you delete or shrink partition you are screwed.

It is best to do secure erase and then create partition of desired size right away to avoid issues. There is also blkdiscard in modern linux which can be used, but you'll need to be careful and specify correct ranges to discard.

tony359 wrote on 2025-08-14, 17:42:

So now I have two options! 😀

500GB HDDs or 250GB SSDs? Costs are similar. The HDD still feels more "original", that is, won't add unknown variables to the equation. Which might not be true as the 1TB HDD was also supposed to do that.
The SSD though seems to work perfectly fine and on a side effect the machine is snappier 😁

My opinion? SSD is the better option. It'll be faster and likely last a lot longer. Also less noise, power, etc.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-15, 05:48:

If done wrong - it makes matters worse. Thing is - you have to be absolutely certain the space you are leaving unallocated is actually empty. Because if it is not you are making matters worse - it'll never be erased or used. Simply deleting or shrinking partition may not be enough, TRIM has to be sent and if OS does not do it when you delete or shrink partition you are screwed.

That's why I was mentioning Samsung Magician, it has an option to set overprovisioning, I'd imagine it would be a firmware feature instructing the firmware to use that amount of space. I believe the drive would appear smaller to the OS after doing that.

My opinion? SSD is the better option. It'll be faster and likely last a lot longer. Also less noise, power, etc.

SSD it is. so far it's performed fine. I am still VERY curious of why larger drives are causing havoc! 😁

tony359 wrote on 2025-08-15, 09:13:

That's why I was mentioning Samsung Magician, it has an option to set overprovisioning, I'd imagine it would be a firmware feature instructing the firmware to use that amount of space. I believe the drive would appear smaller to the OS after doing that.

May be i am wrong and they changed something, but from when i tried, probably a decade ago, it simply made an unallocated area like you can do yourself. Though i'd hope it at least takes care of actually clearing it...