SATA Controller: Pretty much all modern SATA controllers (whether on the motherboard or via a PCI-express SATA card) support TRIM. Since write cycles of the NAND are not infinite, this is a bad thing. Write amplification is when you write X amount of data to the SSD but in reality a larger amount of writes are taking place on the NAND. Not only does this take a long time (leading to a noticeable decrease in performance, but it leads to write amplification. So, the SSD must read the whole block, cache it, erase the whole block, modify the data in cache, and write it back. If you want to actually erase a file, a limitation of how SSDs work is that the entire 512KB block needs to be erased, even if only one little bit of data in there is going to be erased. That in and of itself wouldn’t really be the end of the world, but then you have another factor that comes into play – how SSDs store data.Īn SSD stores data in tiny groups of flash memory cells of about 4-16KB, which are then grouped into 512KB blocks. To write to the NAND that was previously occupied, it must erase the old data, and then write the new data.
However, on an SSD, the whole situation is different. On an HDD, this is no problem, as the drive will simply overwrite the data when it’s time to do so – there is no difference in performance between writing data to a portion of the disk surface that previously contained a file and a spot that never contained any data (like on a new drive, for example). When you delete a file from your computer, it’s not actually physically deleted from the media (whether it be an SSD or HDD) – the space is simply marked as empty by the operating system, and next time the OS wants to use that space it’s overwritten. To understand why TRIM is important, you need some background information on how SSDs handle file deletion different than a mechanical hard drive. TRIM is hands down the most important thing when it comes to preventing performance degradation over time as well as keeping the flash memory (aka NAND) inside your SSD in good condition. In theory, the SSD should simply become read-only, but in real life I’ve never seen this happen, and instead the data is simply gone, that’s why it’s so important you read on (and no matter what, have a backup!) While this specific premature failure was due to poor quality components and/or lacking quality control, not wearing out, an SSD that has reached the end of its lifespan will usually fail similarly, with no warning. My point? Often times, mechanical hard drives show some warning signs prior to failure, such as clicking noises, excessive vibration, etc, SSDs simply die. Well, with just a few hours of use on it, it simply died with no warning – the ThinkPad froze, and upon rebooting the SSD was simply gone, and instead of showing up in the BIOS as the Patriot model it previous was, it simply showed up as PS3109S9, which was the type of controller it used. I ran a few benchmarks on it, and put it into service into a secondary laptop of mine. Recently I purchased a brand new Patriot Torch 60GB.