Trashbytes wrote on 2024-01-18, 12:26:You cant argue with people who are obsessed with Trim use and refuse to believe evidence that modern SSD drives are just fine wi […]
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You cant argue with people who are obsessed with Trim use and refuse to believe evidence that modern SSD drives are just fine without it. Avoiding cheap SSDs using QLC and no Dram, over provision your drive and dont use them as a swap file drive and there is zero doubt the SSD will outlive the retro rig you use it in.
You can even setup a DOS boot disk with Fat 32 support and the Trim command and run it once a month, for NTFS drives running pre Win7 other methods may be required such as a Windows based Trim tool.
You dont need a Trim aware OS to use Trim. (At least for Fat32 partitions, NTFS is a different story but there are ways to Trim under XP)
Again I consider worrying about Trim for retro machines to be a waste of time, they are not being used 24/7 or abused as a file server so the SSD should be able to handle it on its own with little issue.
I know people who would argue that retro computing itself is a waste of time, so I hate to tell retro hobbyists that they are wasting their time lest I have to face myself in a mirror. I can also understand why someone wants their retro computer to run at 110%, as fast as possible and a little more, and maybe getting trim to work is part of that 110%, so if they want obsess on that, I won't tell them to stop. Maybe they discover something that helps me some day.
I agree that most mainstream SSD's work fine without trim on older OS's (Edit: as long as your OS & BIOS (or drive overlay) talk the same LBA scheme as your SSD ). And no matter how tangled the write amplification gets on an SSD, the SSD is still almost certainly going to be faster than anything else. SSD's seem like the best choice unless you crave the spinning rust aesthetic (Edit: or plan on leaving your PC powered off for several years).
My understanding is that if you want to use trim in a meaningful day-to-day manner, it needs to be integrated with the file delete process to work, yes? That's a lot easier if you have a trim aware file system driver in your OS.
I've read suggestions that you can manually trim a flash based storage device by filling all the empty space with a giant file and deleting that file while issuing trim commands for it. Seems like a lot of work for an issue that is likely only theoretical, but it seems like sound logic. Is it worth the effort? It's hard to measure the effect of write amplification without some detailed record keeping. Keeping >10% of your SSD unallocated seems an easier solution since even cheap SSD's have sufficient space for a retro OS.
I've seen that you can reset the write amplification on an SSD with the ATA secure erase command, which resets all of the provisioning data. But one time after using a DOS based ATA secure erase on a CF, it never performed the same afterwards. It became much slower for reads and writes. I should have paid closer attention to what I was doing. It was asking questions and I was in a hurry. Maybe I screwed up the internal over provisioning. Maybe I messed up the sector alignment. I would love to figure it out, but I got other things to work on besides saving an $8 CF. The point is that there might be risks with using the ATA secure erase command.
