Is your new, shiny, and lightening quick SSD all TRIM and proper? Enough with the bad word play; TRIM is a firmware feature found on all recently available solid state drives that aids in maintaining tip-top performance throughout the life of the drive. A drive with TRIM support allows for the operating system to notify the device when data blocks no longer contain data – like after you’ve deleted a file in Explorer. The SSD is then free to wipe the block clean for future re-use. It all sounds rather fundamental doesn’t it?

Before TRIM support, drive manufacturers provided their own tools and utilities that had to be ran periodically by the user not unlike the defrag process of old. Eventually this garbage collection process moved onto the drive’s controller and the burden was lifted from the user. However, the process still was on a schedule and not instantaneous like TRIM. Unfortunately, a general caveat exists: TRIM only exists in Windows 7.

Assuming you fit the Windows 7 requirement, how do you know if TRIM is actually enabled and working?

Open a Command Prompt window with Administrator privileges.

Execute the command fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

• 0 indicates that TRIM is enabled and functioning correctly. Conversely,
• 1 indicates TRIM is disabled and therefor not available to the SSD.

You’ll find that generally Windows is intelligent enough to enable TRIM for you itself. If it’s not enabled it could be a result of improperly installed or otherwise outdated controller drivers. Nevertheless, you can try to enable TRIM manually in that same command prompt window with the command fsutil behavior set disablenotify 0