Trimming SSD drives

[Derek891]

How often should you use the trim function on a SSD? I've read some conflicting opinions on this. One Linux user recommends modifying a system folder so that the trim command is invoked during every system boot. Yet on a Windows forum I visited one person said once a month is more than adequate. I realize that trimming a SSD involves erase/rewrites on a block level and is a tradeoff: it removes deleted files and frees up sectors/blocks for new writes, but does so at the expense of overall wear and longevity. The question is, how much is enough and what is too much? 

[mta]

opinions on this are like armpits: we all have them and most times we think others stink.

i think you'll get both ends of the spectrum since there is no one right or wrong answer.

all comes down to personal preferences and where you lie in the OCD spectrum.

 

for me, i don't touch my SSD.  the initial customisation was to turn off; defragging, timestamps, prefectching, event logging, system restores, 8.3 name creation, hibernation, indexing and relocate the pagefile.

 

now i just leave it alone.

[Augeas]

Do you mean the device-wide TRIM, as the Windows 8 Optimise function?

 

My armpit says that a TRIM command is just that, a command sent to the device to indicate that the relevant page is invalid, and can be gathered up by the garbage collector. It just does what would have to be done anyway on a write, there's no additional writing and wear and tear.

 

My armpit also agrees wit Mta, if you have TRIM enabled then leave it be. Well, if you insist, once every blue moon. Mind you, I have never defragged my disk either, so what do my armpits know?

[Derek891]

Augeas and mta - Thanks to both of you for your replies. After doing some more reading this evening I think I'll be joining the "less is more" camp, in other words, trimming the drive manually instead of using scheduling, and doing it as infrequently as possible using the fstrim command in Linux. I have taken other steps to reduce unnecessary writes to the drive, such as eliminating time stamps, setting up the temp, spool, and log files as virtual files in system memory, disabling the hibernate function, overriding cache management in Firefox and setting it to zero, and putting the home and swap partitions on a second conventional SATA drive. I also was very generous in terms of overprovisioning by using 20GB for a root partition and leaving 91GB as unallocated space. I'm still researching other system tweaks for Linux but for the first day I think I've covered most of the bases. Thanks again for your inputs. - Derek 

 

Here is the link to most of the Linux tweaks I used: https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd  Note: I skipped #8.