Foremay, Inc., a leader of technology innovation in solid state drive ( SSD ), announced the PC166 Leopard W-Series solid state hard drive, which is designed and tested for compliance with Windows 7 SSD TRIM command. With the TRIM function enabled, the SSD can significantly improve sustainable writing speed, as well as prevent writing performance degradation when an SSD is at greater than 50% capacity.
“One of the key features of Windows 7 is its support of the TRIM command,” stated Jack Winters, Co-founder and CTO of Foremay. “Without this support, we had to implement our proprietary active garbage collection algorithm in our high end solid state drives that are listed as the Fastest SSD. Now I am glad to see that Windows 7 supports TRIM so that we can implement more cost-effective passive garbage collection techniques into the PC166 Leopard W-Series and other Foremay SSDs.”
Without TRIM or active garbage collection, when the operating system (OS) tells the SSD to delete a file, the file is not actually “deleted” from the SSD; it is merely marked as “deleted” by the OS. If you want to write a new file onto the “deleted” file block(s), the SSD first needs to erase (or flush) the block(s) that has the “deleted” file to empty the block(s). Only then can the SSD write the new file onto these flushed blocks, i.e., a two step process is required.
With either the TRIM or active garbage collection feature enabled, the garbage cleansing function works in the background to manage and erase/flush “deleted” blocks. Therefore, in the above case, the SSD can complete the writing in only one step. Thus, the TRIM function increases writing speed when the TRIM SSD needs to write a file onto “used” blocks.
In addition to increasing the sustainable writing speed of solid sate disk, TRIM can also increase their lifetime. To enjoy the benefits of TRIM, both your SSD and OS have to support the TRIM command.
