Datamation reports that Solid State Drives will get more consistent performance thanks to a firmware update for systems running Windows 7.
Corsair Memory and OCZ Technology Group, two of the leading suppliers of DRAM- and flash-based memory used in the making of solid-state drives (SSDs), have issued firmware updates to add a feature that will boost the performance of Windows 7 on an SSD.
The feature is called the “TRIM” command, or function. Windows 7 shipped this past October with support for the feature even though none of the SSDs on the market actually could support it. Intel released a firmware update to add TRIM support in August but had to quickly withdraw it due to data corruption problems.
When SSDs first hit the marketplace, users loved the performance, but noticed over time that performance degraded. That’s because unlike a platter-based hard drive, when you delete data from an SSD, the contents in the cells aren’t truly deleted, but are rather marked as being disposable and can be overwritten. So when new data is written, the old data had to be physically deleted first.
TRIM acts like a garbage collector in an application. When you delete data, it actually deletes it and frees up the cells for immediate data writes. This is done when the drive is not otherwise in use.