How do I know if my SSD Drive supports TRIM?

Question

Windows 7 has support for the TRIM command which should help ensure that the performance of an SSD drive remains good through it's life.

How can you tell if a given SSD drive supports TRIM?

See here for a description of TRIM.

Also the following from a Microsoft presentation:

Microsoft implementation of “Trim” feature is supported in Windows 7 NTFS will send down delete notification to the device supporting “trim” File system operations: Format, Delete, Truncate, Compression OS internal processes: e.g., Snapshot, Volume Manager Three optimization opportunities for the device Enhancing device wear leveling by eliminating merge operation for all deleted data blocks Making early garbage collection possible for fast write Keeping device’s unused storage area as much as possible; more room for device wear leveling.

Answer 1

An answer to this question was published in the comments section on the Engineering 7 blog post about SSD and Windows 7.

To find out if Windows 7 is sending the TRIM command you can run the following command from an elevated prompt:

>fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

and how to interpret this based on a comment.

"...if fsutil reports that "DisableDeleteNotify" is 0, then Trim is enabled. (The feature is sometimes referred to using different names: Trim == Delete Notification == Unused Clusters Hint.) The setting is written in terms of disabling something because we like to use values of 0 for defaults.

Have Trim enabled according to this setting, which you do, means that the filesystem will send Trim commands down the storage stack. The filesystem doesn't actually know whether this command will be supported or not at a lower level. When the disk driver receives the command, it will either act on it or ignore it. If you know for sure that your storage devices don't support Trim, you could go ahead and disable Trim (enable DisableDeleteNotify) so the filesystem won't bother to send down these notifications. However sending down the notifications is pretty lightweight and I haven't seen any performance improvement by disabling them, so I don't recommend disabling this setting. If you have an SSD which does support Trim, then you definitely don't want to disable it, because there are some performance gains to be had for leaving the setting in its default form."

It seems that this still won't tell you if the drive and or firmware for the drive supports TRIM. Sigh.

Answer 2

The easiest way to know if your SSD supports TRIM is to use CrystalDiskInfo.

Answer 3

Download and install the Intel SSD Toolbox.

If your drive is not an Intel SSD, the only option available will be View Drive Information. Click that. Scroll down to

Word 169, Bit 0 - Data Set Management Supported

If this is 1, you have TRIM. If 0, you don't.

Answer 4

Sending the disabledeletenotify command to the SSD only checks if the TRIM command is being sent. The drive, of course, needs to support TRIM. The best way of doing that is to go to the manufacturer's website and check in the detailed spec for your drive.