On December 02 2011 09:51 Soloside wrote:
Sorry if this sounds a little dumb, but what do you mean by TRIM and filling up quickly? Does it just mean that my SSD is too full to perform at a decent rate? It's currently at 18.7 GB of free space....
Anandtech describes in detail how SSDs work, and what Trim is, which is why I linked that article. I suppose you might have to dig back to some of the earlier SSD articles to figure it out, though.
When you tell an SSD to delete a file, it marks that space on the flash as open to writes, but does not reinitialize the data. Further, because data is written in (typically 4KB) blocks, there is frequently some portion of a block that is not meant to be deleted. Thus, when you've filled the drive once, each time you want to write data, even when it shows a lot of free space, the SSD has to copy those useful bits somewhere and erase the rest, then write, rather than only writing. This process is quite slow, however I wouldn't expect it to affect boot, which consists of primarily read operations.
Trim is a command that can be sent by modern operating systems to the SSD which tells it to actually go through and reinitialize the flash blocks that have been "deleted" in the operating system, so that when you actually want to go write, there will be some available space, and the drive won't feel sluggish at that time. There is probably a tool for the m4 that will let you perform a Trim on your drive.