TRIM basics

Why is TRIM Necessary?

When a file is deleted, the operating system doesn’t erase the data right away—instead, it marks that area on the disk as overwriteable in the index of all files on the disk, so the next time data needs to be written to the drive, it can use the space previously taken up by that file. This, incidentally, is why file recovery software works—provided the space hasn’t been written over, the data is still on your drive and can thus be recovered. It’s important to note that the drive itself doesn’t know anything about the status of the data on the drive. This blind-drive system works fine for mechanical hard drives since they can overwrite old data with no penalty, but because of the way NAND flash memory is arranged, slowdowns can occur once all the blocks on the drive have been used once.

The flash memory in solid state drives typically stores data in 4KB chunks, called pages, grouped in blocks of 128 pages each. Data can be read and written at the 4KB page level, but can only be erased at the 512KB block level. And while reading data and writing to unused pages on an SSD is much faster than on a standard hard drive, overwriting data is a complicated, multi-step procedure, one that SSDs typically perform only when they have run out of fresh blocks to write to.

When an SSD runs out of fresh blocks, it has to write over data the file system has marked as deleted. And that’s where the slowdowns begin. To overwrite a single 4KB page the file system first has to copy the entire 512KB block to its memory cache. Then, in cache, the overwriteable pages are deleted and replaced with the new data. Next, the entire 512KB block on the drive is erased and rewritten with the cached data. If you’re writing to many blocks at a time—either through a series of small random write operations, or simply by writing a large file to disk—you can overload your drive’s cache pretty quickly, and then your write speeds will plummet. You can imagine how slow it can be when you’re writing a 2GB file or performing lots of 4KB writes. Users of early SSDs sometimes found themselves with write latencies of up to a second. To compensate, SSD manufacturers began increasing the size of their drives’ DRAM cache to 64MB or even 128MB, and adopting faster drive controllers. This largely eliminated random-write stuttering, but drives were still slowing down as they ran out of fresh pages.

What TRIM Does

In a nutshell, the problem is that the OS and the file system don’t communicate information about deleted files to the SSD, and all writes to pages that contain unerased deleted data require a full block-level erase and rewrite, which can drastically reduce write speeds.  There are two approaches to fixing this problem. The first is to run a garbage-collection program periodically that scans the entire drive and erases the contents of deleted pages.  Many drive vendors now ship a program called wiper.exe that will erase deleted pages throughout the entire drive to return it to like-new performance. In some cases this program actually completely clears the drive, requiring valid data to be backed up beforehand. The second, better approach is to have the OS tell the drive when data is deleted, so that the drive can erase those blocks immediately. That’s what the TRIM command does.

When a file is deleted on a TRIM-enabled system, the OS sends a command to the SSD to let it know that the data in a particular set of pages can be overwritten, moving control over deleted data from the OS level to the drive’s firmware. The SSD then copies the blocks containing the deleted data to cache, erases the blocks, then rewrites only the pages with data on them. Thus, the caching and erasing process is moved out of the time-sensitive write cycle and into the time between the actual deletion and the next write, so the slowdown is less likely to cause a noticeable performance hit.

Posted by rogerluethy on July 18, 2010

http://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/trim-basics/