When TRIM and GC works?

[temu26]

Hi all,
i have heard that TRIM and GC take the idle time on our computers to work and restore SSD.

But i dont know when they do that. Do i have to let the computer all night doing nothing? or do i have to logoff? maybe TRIM and GC works in different way...i dont know.

thanks!

[major53]

Hi all,
i have heard that TRIM and GC take the idle time on our computers to work and restore SSD.

But i dont know when they do that. Do i have to let the computer all night doing nothing? or do i have to logoff? maybe TRIM and GC works in different way...i dont know.

thanks!

Hope this helps you out temu26 In computing, a TRIM command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.

TRIM was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative for traditional hard disks as permanent storage in PCs. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from traditional hard disks (see details below), the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats (not explicitly communicating the involved sectors/pages to the underlying storage medium) resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs.[1] TRIM enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, that would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.[2]

Although tools to "reset" some drives to a fresh state were already available before the introduction of TRIM, they also delete all data on the drive, which makes them impractical to use for ongoing optimization.[3] More recent SSDs will often contain internal idle/background garbage collection mechanisms that work independently of TRIM; although this successfully maintains their performance even under operating systems that do not (yet) support TRIM, it has the drawback of increased write amplification and associated increased wear of the flash cells.[4]

from what I have read garbage collection needs you to leave your PC in idling mode for about couple hours.the garbage collction will do it's thing while in idling state.

[Bec]

TRIM is executed instantly upon deletion of a file.

The classic deletion process marks files as being overwritable at block level but no actual deletion takes place.

SSDs need to firstly clear the cells (00000...) before writing. If TRIM is not applied the drive has to waste extra time to clear a cell before writing to it, hence a slowdown.

TRIM works instantly upon deletion of a file by 0-ing out those cells, hence it doesn't have anything to do with idling.

You shouldn't be concerned about GC either, as SSDs are way faster than a HDD.
Defragmentation is a time costly process on a HDD, that only takes seconds on an SSD. Same with GC.

NOTE: defragmentation is not required on SSDs and will shorten their lifetime significantly. Always disable it.