This default Windows setting is making your SSD slower than it should be
SSDs are fast, but even they can slow down over time. If you’re looking for speed and feel like your SSD sometimes starts to get a little slower, especially towards the end of a week, there’s a setting you might want to check called TRIM.
What is TRIM?
TRIM is a particular SSD command that does something very simple. It tells an SSD that the data has been deleted and the space it occupied is free for use. Why would you need to do this? When you delete files on your computer, they are not deleted immediately. When the TRIM command is sent to the SSD, the operating system tells it which blocks are now free. The SSD controller will use this information in a process called garbage collection to erase all of these empty blocks, preparing them for new data.
More precisely, it looks like this. You “delete” a file on your computer. Your operating system sends a TRIM command to the SSD, letting it know that the block containing this data is no longer needed. SSD doesn’t delete data immediately, it just writes it down. When your computer is idle and not doing much, the SSD runs a process called garbage collection, and that’s when blocks marked by TRIM are deleted.
The point of all this is that your SSD doesn’t need to “determine” which blocks are free space and which blocks are not. Thanks to TRIM, it does not need to perform an operation to browse the SSD and search for valid or invalid data on its own. Think of it like a child doing the dishes; if you just tell them to figure out where everything goes, it will take them a while to do the work. If you tell them where each dish goes, they will finish it much faster.
So, TRIM means your SSD has to perform fewer operations while still performing maintenance and erasing old data. Every SSD has a limited lifespan and a theoretical number of operations it can perform before being kaput, so reducing operations via TRIM extends the lifespan of your SSD. TRIM is automatically enabled for most SSDs, starting with Windows 7. You don’t need to enable it in most cases, but you can optimize it to make your SSD faster.
Adjusting the TRIM schedule to speed up your SSD
The whole process we talked about above happens on a schedule. Most often, TRIM orders are sent once a week, and this is what we really want to change. Let’s say your computer’s weekly TRIM operation occurs on Sunday. Well, if you delete something (which actually just flags it for deletion) from the SSD on Monday, it’s not actually deleted until the TRIM operation happens. This means that your SSD retains this data throughout the week.
Naturally, this means that space isn’t actually freed up on your SSD until long after you’ve “deleted” something. So if you were deleting things in hopes of speeding up your SSD, it won’t actually help you until the weekly TRIM operation happens. However, you can change the frequency of TRIM operations if you wish. You can change this to happen every few days, or even every day. This would increase how often your SSD actually deletes old data and consolidates existing data.
In other words, you can increase the frequency at which your SSD actually operates at maximum efficiency, with its data all sorted and its maximum amount of free space. This can, in turn, make your SSD a little faster if it has been slow throughout the week.
Certainly, unless your SSD is regularly bursting with data, the benefits of accelerating its TRIM schedule might be minimal. If your SSD has 120 GB of available space, pushing TRIM forward so that it has 140 GB instead probably won’t make a huge difference. But if your SSD has very limited space, running TRIM more frequently can ensure you can access your free space after deleting something as soon as possible.
Another situation where TRIM schedule acceleration is useful is if you use your SSD for large and frequent data exchange, which is common with things like large databases or video editing. In these situations, you may write and delete large files very frequently, in which case you will probably want your data blocks freed and available as quickly as possible.
Other than 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 want to change the TRIM schedule for some reason, it’s not difficult to do.
How to Change Your SSD TRIM Schedule
Changing the TRIM schedule of your SSD is very simple. Simply go down to the search box on your taskbar and type “optimize.” One of the options should be “Defrag and Optimize Drives”. Click on it. This will open a very simple window displaying all the drives on your computer. At the bottom of a new window will be a section called “Scheduled Optimization”. Click the button at the bottom that says “Change Settings.”
A new window will open and you will see that your automatic optimization schedule is probably weekly. From here, you can change the SSD’s switching frequency to daily if you wish.
Modern SSDs are already very efficient. In many cases, you won’t need to change too many settings. But if you’re the kind of person who loves to optimize everything to the max, adjusting your SSD’s TRIM schedule might be just what you need to squeeze the latest performance out of your hardware.
