SSDs are fast, but even they can be slowed down over time. If you live for speed and feel like your SSD starts to get just a little slower sometimes, especially near the end of a week, there is one setting you might want to check out called TRIM.
What is TRIM?
TRIM is a particular SSD command that does something very simple. It tells an SSD that data has been deleted, and that the space that data used to occupy is free to use. Why would you need to do that? When you delete files on your computer, they are not actually deleted right away. When the TRIM command is sent to the SSD, the OS tells it which blocks are now free. The SSD controller will use that information during a process called garbage collection to erase all of those empty blocks, which prepares them for new data.
Specifically, it goes something like this. You “delete” a file on your computer. Your OS sends a TRIM command to the SSD, letting it know that the block with that data is not needed any longer. The SSD doesn’t delete the data right away, it just makes a note of it. When your computer is idle and not doing much, the SSD runs a process called garbage collection, and this is when those blocks flagged by TRIM are deleted.
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
The point of all of this is that your SSD doesn’t have to “figure out” which blocks are free space and which blocks aren’t. Thanks to TRIM, it doesn’t have to run an operation to go through the SSD and search for valid or invalid data on its own. Think of it like a child doing the dishes; if you tell them to just figure out where everything goes, it will take them a while to do the job. If you tell them where every dish goes, they will finish it much more quickly.
So, TRIM means your SSD has to perform fewer operations while conducting maintenance and clearing old data. Every SSD has a limited lifespan and number of theoretical operations it can complete before going kaput, so cutting down on operations via TRIM extends your SSD’s lifespan. TRIM is automatically enabled for most SSDs, and has been since Windows 7. You don’t need to turn it on in most cases, but you can optimize it to make your SSD faster.
Adjusting TRIM schedule to speed up your SSD
The whole process we talked about above happens on a schedule. Most often, TRIM commands are sent once a week, and this is what we actually want to change. Let’s say your computer’s weekly TRIM operation occurs on Sunday. Well, if you delete something (which is actually just flagging it for deletion) from the SSD on Monday, it’s not actually deleted for real until the TRIM operation occurs. That means your SSD is still keeping that data throughout the entire week.
Naturally, that means space isn’t actually being freed up on your SSD until long after you “deleted” something. So if you were deleting stuff in hopes of speeding up your SSD, it’s not actually helping until the weekly TRIM operation occurs. However, you can change the frequency of TRIM operations if you want. You could change it to happen every few days, or even every single day. This would increase the frequency at which your SSD actually deletes old data and consolidates existing data.
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
In other words, you can increase how often your SSD is actually running at peak efficiency, with its data all sorted and its maximum amount of free space. This can, in turn, make your SSD a bit faster if it’s been acting sluggish throughout the week.
Now, admittedly, unless your SSD is chock full of data on the regular, the benefits of accelerating its TRIM schedule might be minuscule. If your SSD has 120GB of space available, pushing TRIM forward so it has 140GB instead probably isn’t going to make a huge difference. But if your SSD has very limited space left, running TRIM more frequently can ensure you get access to your free space after deleting something as soon as possible.
Another situation where accelerating the TRIM schedule helps is if you use your SSD for heavy and frequent data swapping, which is common with things like large databases or video editing. In those situations, you may be writing and deleting large files very frequently, in which case you’ll probably want your data blocks freed up and available as quickly as possible.
Outside of that, you probably don’t need to worry about it. If you use your SSD for ordinary, everyday use, the default TRIM schedule is fine. But if you do want to change the TRIM schedule for any reason, it’s not hard to do.
How to change your SSD TRIM schedule
Changing your SSD’s TRIM schedule is super easy. Just go down to the search box in your taskbar, and type “optimize.” One of the options should be “Defragment and Optimize Drives.” Click on that. This will open a very simple window showing all of the drives on your computer. At the bottom of a new window will be a section called “Scheduled optimization”. Click on the button down there that says “Change settings.”
A new window will open, and you will see that your automatic optimization schedule is likely weekly. From here, you can change the frequency of SSD trimming to daily if you so wish.
Modern SSDs are very efficient already. In many cases, you won’t need to mess around with too many of their settings. But if you are the type of person who loves to optimize absolutely everything to the max, adjusting the TRIM schedule of your SSD might be just what you need to get those last few smidgens of performance ability out of your hardware.
