With the arrival of SSDs, new technologies were introduced to the market to get the most out of these storage units and take advantage of the higher data transfer speeds they offer. But, in addition, new methods were also born to carry out data management in a more efficient way, TRIM being a clear example.
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, the time needed to access it is reduced since all the corresponding physical data stored is in one place and not scattered on the hard drive.
What is TRIM used for?
The goal of this technology is to 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 it completes 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 that this technology offers us is in the increase in the performance of solid hard drives (SSD). 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 you think about it carefully, TRIM technology doesn’t really have any drawbacks beyond that related to the performance of SSDs. If we deactivate it, the performance of our unit will be considerably reduced.
Unlike traditional mechanical hard drives, in which a head accesses the information stored on a disk, SSDs are nothing more than memory chips, chips that, over time, wear out and lose speed both in reading and in writing. writing.
Disable TRIM of an SSD in Windows
The first thing we must be clear about if we want to deactivate TRIM on an SSD is that the information stored inside it will be unrecoverable if 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 value 0, it means TRIM is enabled . 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 exit command and restart the computer.