Both Intel and Samsung have software that allows manual execution of the trim order in XP. I do have several SSDs that are supported. One could propably boot XP and execute the trim app.

But I was thinking more in the lines of using win7-win11 to trim, when I have full trim support.

Not sure if Nareon SSD tools is compatible with Win9x

ux-3 wrote on 2025-10-17, 16:53:

In general, I would think that lacking trim or garbage collection is not such an issue if I mainly play on these SSD.
But could I get them trimmed by sticking them into my win11 machine? Is there something that will trigger it?

Not sure about Win11 but in Win10 just use the defragment and optimise drive utility. If it detects a drive as "Solid State Drive" then it will offer to trim it instead of defragment.

Also to be clear, garbage collection happens in the background on an SSD anyway. If a sector is rewritten, the old version of the sector is marked as free and when garbage collection next occurs, it can move currently allocated sectors to a new NAND block, skipping all the previously overwritten sectors. Sort of like a defrag at the flash level that is transparent to the host.

ux-3 wrote on 2025-10-17, 16:53:

Also: What action will make the drive management consider all cells to be empty? Creating a partition? Fast format? Nothing at all?

Not sure about Windows but in Linux formatting a partition will trim unallocated space or manually use blkdiscard. I guess in Windows you could format a partition, then manually optimise (trim) it to be sure.

If you want to clean the ssd completely secure erase is the best thing to do. Apart from user accessible storage it also vipes all the metadata and everything, basically returning ssd to 'new' state.

I realy like this article: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_ … y_cell_clearing

The easiest way to do trim manually is booting linux on the machine itself. No need to mess with hardware and really easy to do.

Can use clonezilla live cd to do all this stuff as it is pretty small and contains all the tools you may need for working with storage. Having 512mb of ram recommended though...

jtchip wrote on 2025-10-19, 02:22:

Not sure about Win11 but in Win10 just use the defragment and optimise drive utility. If it detects a drive as "Solid State Drive" then it will offer to trim it instead of defragment.

Bingo. Thanks!

Archer57 wrote on 2025-10-19, 03:33:

If you want to clean the ssd completely secure erase is the best thing to do. Apart from user accessible storage it also vipes all the metadata and everything, basically returning ssd to 'new' state.

Is this available in Win11?

Even TRIM you can still use, if needed - there is utility from R. Loew: https://rloewelectronics.com/