How to manually TRIM an SSD?

[1voyager2]

I pulled out an old PC to put to use temporarily.
Mobo: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
CPU: i7 920
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 60GB SATA III
HDD: Seagate 1GB ST1000DM003-1CH162 SATA III
Win7 x64

I installed a drive monitor to check things out.
It says that the SSD is TRIM capable but TRIM is disabled.
Win7 says that TRIM is enabbled.

AFter digging around a bit and updating the Marvell 91xx driver for the SATA 6GB PCIe card with no satisfaction, I finally learn that the Marvell 91xx controler does not support TRIM.

Finally, I dug out the old ForceTrim.exe utillity, again no satisfaction.
The Marvell controler apparently is blocking it.


Is there any way to TRIM, do garbage collection, or what ever to clean this SSD up in order to get it to show 100% health?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You basically have to get that TRIM or UNMAP command down the command chain, from you to the drive controller. The SATA controller is the second to last link in that chain - if it won't recognize of pass along the command, there's nothing you can do.

Easy answer: Plug it into one of the Intel-driven SATA ports on the motherboard. They'll be limited to 3Gbps (SATA-2) but they'll work better and support all the features.

IIRC, the "slower" Intel SATA-2 ports on the 5x and 6x chipsets often outperformed the add-in SATA-3 cards available at the time, depending on the benchmark.

That said, the Sandforce controller in the Vertex 3 SSD was pretty good about working in systems that didn't support TRIM. It had very aggressive garbage collection and would keep itself more or less "TRIM-ed" most of the time regardless. At least when they weren't failing and hosing your data. (Make sure you update to the latest firmware on that thing. They eventually got the bugs ironed out.)

"100% health" is a curious choice of phrase - are you referring to SMART data? Or drive life expectancy? Running a TRIM command won't reset reallocated sector count, and life expectancy is based on total data written; it's a one-way trip to 0%.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

You could always nuke it from orbit (so to speak)

Use hdparm in any live Linux distro :
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass lolcat /dev/sdX
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase lolcat /dev/sdX

 

[Elixer]

Is there any way to TRIM, do garbage collection, or what ever to clean this SSD up in order to get it to show 100% health?

As was mentioned, that boat has sailed. You can't undo wear.

The best way to deal with older type SSDs that don't have support TRIM, is to just let them sit for awhile on the BIOS screen.
Then the SSD's GC's routines will be running.

 

[1voyager2]

OK, right now the old PC is parked on the BIOS screen.

apparently Toshiba-OCZ has cut the Vertex and other 3's loose and does not support them any more.
I did find the OCZ Toolbox with firmware v2.50 for the Vertex3 in it, and have it in tow.
That is the latest firmware version I can find.
The P6T Deluxe V2 does not support the use of a USB drive as far as I can tell.
My newer PC with a P8Z77-V does.
I have just gone into the BIOS and made sure that USB is functional during POST.
But, I do have a drive dock attached to the newer PC which has a Crucial MX300 SSD in it.
Could I install the OCZ toolbox on the newer PC , put the OCZ Vertex3 into the drive dock and update the firmware from the PC or a USB drive?

My error:
The drive monitor utility lists Performance just above Health on the Overview tab.
It is showing 80% performance because of the TRIM issue.
I said Health when I meant Performance.
Health is 100%.

 

[ashetos]

Secure erase might help, creating a huge partition from windows and quick formatting it might help. I would boot from linux and run blkdiscard on it. (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/blkdiscard.8.html)

Edit:
Obviously you need to do all that from a modern enough PC whose SATA controller supports TRIM.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

OK, right now the old PC is parked on the BIOS screen.

apparently Toshiba-OCZ has cut the Vertex and other 3's loose and does not support them any more.
I did find the OCZ Toolbox with firmware v2.50 for the Vertex3 in it, and have it in tow.
That is the latest firmware version I can find.
The P6T Deluxe V2 does not support the use of a USB drive as far as I can tell.
My newer PC with a P8Z77-V does.
I have just gone into the BIOS and made sure that USB is functional during POST.
But, I do have a drive dock attached to the newer PC which has a Crucial MX300 SSD in it.
Could I install the OCZ toolbox on the newer PC , put the OCZ Vertex3 into the drive dock and update the firmware from the PC or a USB drive?

My error:
The drive monitor utility lists Performance just above Health on the Overview tab.
It is showing 80% performance because of the TRIM issue.
I said Health when I meant Performance.
Health is 100%.

You usually can't patch firmware when they're plugged into a USB dock. Or do secure erase, for that matter.

The P6T should boot form USB just fine though.

80% "Performance" because of lack of TRIM on an empty drive is... bad math. Don't worry about it.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

If you're that worried, just secure erase your SSDs every few months or something.
That's what I do to all my SSDs (~once a year), and they're all trucking along fine (OCZ, Samsung, etc.)

 

[1voyager2]

OK, I moved the SSD to one of the ICH10R SATA II ports. TRIM is enabled and performance is now rated at 100%. That tells me that the 80% rating is not an actual performance hit, but just an attention getting device.

Moving the SSD to the SATA II port did bring actual performance down though. Writes dropped from about 310 to 260 MB/s, reads from about 400 to 280 MB/s, per ATTO.
The SSD is not empty. It has about 57% used space.
I'm thinking that I may look around for a non-RAID SATA III PCIe card that supports TRIM.
While I am thinking of moving to Linux when Win7 has run its course, It still cannot fulfill my Win-apps needs. Hopefully by the time I'm forced to decide, PS and other media/graphics type apps may have LInux versions available.

Thanks guys, I got what I wanted from this, an understanding of what was actually happening with it.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

OK, I moved the SSD to one of the ICH10R SATA II ports. TRIM is enabled and performance is now rated at 100%. That tells me that the 80% rating is not an actual performance hit, but just an attention getting device.

Moving the SSD to the SATA II port did bring actual performance down though. Writes dropped from about 310 to 260 MB/s, reads from about 400 to 280 MB/s, per ATTO.

What about random/4k performance? That's actually more important for general-use scenarios, IMO.

The SSD is not empty. It has about 57% used space.
I'm thinking that I may look around for a non-RAID SATA III PCIe card that supports TRIM.
While I am thinking of moving to Linux when Win7 has run its course, It still cannot fulfill my Win-apps needs. Hopefully by the time I'm forced to decide, PS and other media/graphics type apps may have LInux versions available.

Probably not, but there are similar substitutes that work. GIMP is incredibly powerful, but works completely differently that PS, for instance. Inkscape vs. Illustrator. Good pro-quality and prosumer-quality video and audio editing packages are also available, but they are not the Big Brand Name Programs that everybody uses on Windows.

 

[1voyager2]

I got side tracked for a bit.
I will not be making the upgrade to Win10 unless my reservations about it are quelled.
Which, I do not have high hopes of that happening.
I've tried a few Linux flavors off and on over the years.
I've always gone back to Windows simply because of its familiarity.

I am so happy with the improvements in the Adobe apps through the last few iterations, for the portions of the apps that I use, that I find it hard to believe that GIMP will work as well for me.
But, I'll never know until I give it a try, which won't happen until I'm ready to throw Windows out the window.
Unless M$ has a massive change in their attitude in the next version after 10, I will probably be giving Linux my most serious try ever.