Introducing DuckieHo, Intel SSD Communities' first Moderator!

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Everyone,

I wanted to take a quick second to introduce our communities site (and Intel's first ever!) moderator, DuckieHo. He's a well-seasoned SSD expert and is here to help answer your solid-state storage related questions. DuckieHo will be meeting periodically with myself and Intel engineers to make sure he's got the best possible information and that users' concerns will be heard. If you've got any questions/concerns, please voice them here, but if not, come say what's up to DuckieHo!

-Scott, Intel Corporation

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That appears to be correct. Windows 7 issues TRIM commands at the physical volume level regardless of whether you use a HDD or a SSD

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Hi their DuckieHo.

I was wondering do Intel SSD have garbage collection thing (Intel might have it called something else and this is not to do with TRIM or the OS this is what the SSD does) that other SSD have? From what I can work out all SSD do realtime garbage collection that erases blocks where data has been deleted to add new data and this works on a single SSD or in a RAID. Then there is idle/background garbage collection that free up more blocks ahead of time when the SSD is idle.

So can you confirm what and if garbage collection is part of Intel SSD? And if idle/background garbage collection is part of or can be supported on Intel's SSD?

Thanks

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Intel SSDs do not have idle time garbage collection (ITGC) or background garbage collection (BGC) Some SSD controllers like Indilinx Barefoot, SandForce SF-1200, or Samsung S3C29RBB01-YK40 do have this feature. This is an internal feature of the drive. The controller determines when it is idle for long enough and then does a file system compare against what is actually valid on the drive. It then cleans up the dirty pages. The actually implementation of garbage varies between controllers though. The downside to idle/background garbage collection is write amplification as it may perform unnecessary writes.

While Intel SSDs do not idle/background garbage collection, they have are very resilent to dirty pages. I believe this is what you are refering to when you say realtime garbage collection. Then impact of deletes varies between controllers and has to do with how the drive decides manages data.

If TRIM is working, you do not want/need idle/background garbage collection. For Intel G2 drives not in an array, the SSD Toolbox Optimization is a manual garbage collection (and can be scheduled). The scenario where you want/need idle/background garbage collection is SSD in RAID.

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I guess Intel sees garbage collection as an inefficient way of freeing up space then TRIM is in any SSD configuration when fully compatible.

Thanks for answering I look forward to that TRIM-related article and if possible how Intel deals with dirty pages when TRIM is not used.

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From what I have observed the OS issues a TRIM command (of proportional size to a file deletion) as soon as it occurs. Temporary files also seem to trigger a TRIM command when they expire.

Is it possible to give any information about how an Intel SSD deals with a TRIM command from the OS? Does it implement it immediately or does it store the command and execute it when the drive is not busy? Thanks.