Let’s clarify.. SSD, TRIM and Garbage Collection

Today’s SSDs are fast and reliable storage solutions, far more cheaper than they were a few years ago. A 256GB high-end consumer unit can be bought for less than 150 dollars and the improvements over a traditional HD are tremendous: a SSD won’t make your Call of Duty frame rate higher, but your PC will be more reactive. You will save time in almost every operation.

The advantages are even higher in storage-intensive professional tasks.

As manufacturers move to higher density cells the lifespan of the memory chips decreases, but the overall lifespan of the disks stands still thanks to the advancements on the software side.

Ars Technica has published yesterday an interesting articles on how SSD works and why the TRIM support is important to maintain high performance over time.

Almost all the SSDs available today have some sort of Garbage Collection, a low-level service that re-organize data to improve performance. Garbage Collection is good but it’s not an alternative to TRIM support.

Furthermore, an aggressive Garbage Collection reduces the lifespan of your drive.

Anyway, Ars Technica made a great job explaining this and we suggest you to take 5 minutes and read their article: Ask Ars: “My SSD does garbage collection, so I don’t need TRIM… right?”

For further information also read: Solid-state revolution: in-depth on how SSDs really work

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