SSD Without TRIM

[geokilla]

What are the consequences of running a SSD without TRIM? I thought of this after having a friend buy a SSD to use with his 4 year old computer (Intel G33 I think). Since it's so old, it most likely won't have TRIM. The long-term effects are that lack of TRIM will cause the drive to degrade in say 3 years instead of 5, but short term, there's little to no effects right? He puts his computer to stand by.

Same goes for my AMD 770 chipset which does not seem to have the TRIM command passed correctly, despite it being in the drivers. However, I run Folding@Home when the computer overnight when electricity is at its cheapest so it's "idle" for a couple hours.

 

[fastamdman]

I'm sure it will all be ok

 

[Ichigo]

Isn't there some app that you can manually run for garbage detection?

I admit to being completely ignorant about what it is exactly but I swear I heard of it.

 

[Zorander]

I ran a first-generation Kingston SSD (no TRIM support) for more than 2 years in my old system and also the current one. Never ran into any problems nor noticed any serious slow-down.

Granted, my moderate internet and gaming needs hardly did heavy writes on the drive. If OP's friend does subject the drive to a lot of writes, I imagine there would be a noticable slow-down eventually. Otherwise, I'm sure it will all be ok

 

[exdeath]

Any SSD worth buying will have a software suite that includes an "SSD optimization tool" to run a manual TRIM in XP.

 

[Concillian]

There was a problem in what are now very old SSDs where if you filled your drive and then deleted some stuff and continued using it, things would get REALLY bad.

Now?

Things never get REALLY bad on any modern SSD. Anand runs a test that demonstrates some weaknesses in garbage collection of some drives. In reality though, nobody will torture a drive like unless they KNOW they're doing it. Most drives will be perfectly fine without any special treatment.

Garbage collection on modern SSDs is FINE for an average user with or without trim.
Leave it at the windows login screen for 30 minutes a month if you're super paranoid, but I doubt that's even necessary for average use.

 

[groberts101]

I'm of the same mindset as that guy^. GC is the most powerful recovery tool available to any modern SSD and goes beyond trim's capabilities anyways.

and FYI.. the age of the system has far smaller impact than the OS and drivers used. W7 will pass the command with anything older than that not passing the command. Then there's the fact that the SSD controller used will have impact on it's effectiveness even if there is trim pass-through.

another way to do it is to run AS Cleaner(free space cleaner) with the FF option checked(important to check that option for correct clearing of nand). This will speed up all but Sandforce controlled drives nearly instantly after running the utility. Still best to let it idle and remap data for a few hours after running that utility though. Is part of the old "Tony-Trim" method for clearing the blocks at the physical level.

 

[Coup27]

It's worth mentioning that the only Intel SSD which does not support TRIM is the original black X25-M. If you are buying any other you can download the Intel SSD Toolbox which contains a manual TRIM feature.