Windows 10 Quick Tips – SSD TRIM

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are very popular these days, and for good reason. After the first hiccups expected in any new technology, things have settled down and SSDs are now as reliable as mechanical Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). As I’m sure you all know, SSDs really shine when it comes to speed. They are many times faster than a traditional HDD which makes them a very good upgrade option. They use much less energy, fragmentation is a thing of the past, and since they have no moving parts, they are dead quiet. Not a lick of “head-thrashing” or whining to be heard. Silent bliss…

TRIM

“A trim command (known as TRIM in the ATA command set, and UNMAP in the SCSI command set) 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 were introduced. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from hard drives, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. Trimming enables the SSD to more efficiently handle garbage collection, which would otherwise slow future write operations to the involved blocks.” ~ Wikipedia

If you care about your SSD and increasing its lifetime and usefulness, then it is important that TRIM is enabled on your computer system. Windows 10 automatically recognizes SSDs and enables TRIM for those devices by default. We all know, however, that any version of Windows can make mistakes, so it might be good idea to make sure it got things right. This week’s quick Tips article will show you how.

Is TRIM Enabled?

It’s easy to find out if TRIM is enabled on your computer. We’ll be using the Command Prompt to do this. There are a few commands to enter and it might be advisable to copy and paste them so as to avoid typographical errors:

1. Click the Start button and type cmd
2. Choose Command Prompt from the list (to open with Administrator Privileges, right-click instead)
3. In the window that opens, type fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify and hit <Enter>

That should bring you here:

If the indicated result is “0” (zero), then TRIM is enabled on your computer, otherwise it is not.

Note: The line below it can be ignored by home users.

How To Enable TRIM

If, for some reason known only to Microsoft, Windows messed up, then enabling TRIM is as easy as can be:

1. Open a Command Prompt with Administrator Privileges (see Step 2 above)
2. In the window that opens type fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 and hit <Enter>

How To Disable TRIM

I know of no good reason to do this, but here it is if you want to know how:

1. Open a Command Prompt with Administrator Privileges
2. In the window that opens type fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 1 and hit <Enter>

That’s all there is to it. You can now say with confidence that TRIM is enabled on your computer.

As always, if you have any helpful suggestions, comments or questions, please share them with us,

Richard

Update: One of our readers commented that this article was remiss in pointing out that “fsutil” will only show if TRIM is enabled. It does not offer a way of knowing if TRIM is being utilized by the drive itself. Thank you to satrow for letting us know about this oversight and for offering a couple of solutions. Read the comments for more information.

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