Before and After – TRIM Feature

Windows 7 starts up in less than 30 seconds, with AntiVirus software and other tools in the system tray, the OS is very snappy, thanks to the goodness that is SSD. If you haven’t worked on a machine powered by a current generation SSD, you are missing out.

First up we launched Crystal Disk Info tool:



Things to note here are the Firmware version and the Support Features area.

We rebooted the system, went into the BIOS, set the SATA operation mode to “IDE”; booted from the downloaded CD. After about 5min the new firmware was written to the G2 and the system was powered down.

The upgrade process is quite painless and if everything goes fine you should not have any data loss; of course, nothing is certain in the IT world; so we recommend making a backup of your valuable data if it resides on the SSD.

The system was started up again and CDI revealed the following changes:



The firmware version has correctly changed, and in the feature list we see that “TRIM” has been added!

Anandtech tested to see if TRIM was working by performing 4k random writes, doing a performance test before/after; they noticed a performance drop, then they formatted the drive, this will invoke the TRIM command, and afterwards the performance was back up to the original highs. Now what if you don’t want to do all that just to see if TRIM is working under Windows 7?

Open a command prompt (with admin rights) and run the command:

“fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify”.

This will check the value of the disabledeletenotify variable. If it returns “0” it means that the TRIM feature is enabled in Windows 7, it doesn’t mean it’s working though.

Next item on the checklist is to go under Device Manager and check your storage controllers; the drivers of the one the SSD is hooked on to should be the Microsoft driver! Any other 3rd party driver (including Intel Matrix) doesn’t support TRIM.

Performance

CrystalDiskMark HDD bench does read and write tests; we ran it on the Intel SSD with a test file of 1000Mb, an average of 5 repeats. The first test is sequential, the second is random with 512k file size, the third random with 4k file size chunks, the last test is the 4k random with a queue dept of 32.

The results with the shipping firmware:



The results with the new firmware:



A noticeable boost in sequential write speeds, the G2 is now capable of over 100Mb/s, while sequential read speeds dropped by ~10mb/s. The 512k test shows less difference, the write tests are even 100% identical.

At 4k the new firmware proves superior in both read and write. With a queue depth of 32 the result remain consistently slightly in front of the previous firmware.

---

Looking at the numbers, if you’re a lucky owner of X25-M G2 160Gb, there is plenty of reason to upgrade to this latest firmware and enjoy extra features and performance for free!