Using TRIM on spinning rust

Dec 01, 2020 1 Replies

Does anybody have experience/ideas regarding the use of TRIM with SMR hard drives? I recently discovered I own one, and would like to make the best of a bad (and increasingly unavoidable) situation.



According to the tests at

formatting link
it appears that trim is supported, but turned off on my (default) RaspiOS installation:



bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo fstrim -v / [sudo] password for bob: fstrim: /: the discard operation is not supported bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo lsblk -D NAME DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO sda 0 0B 0B 0 sda1 0 0B 0B 0 sda2 0 0B 0B 0 sda3 0 0B 0B 0 bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sg_vpd -p bl /dev/sda | grep unmap Maximum unmap LBA count: 65535 Maximum unmap block descriptor count: 8 Optimal unmap granularity: 0 blocks [not reported] bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sg_vpd -p lbpv /dev/sda | grep Unmap Unmap command supported (LBPU): 1 Since SMR hard drives suffer the same convolutions as SSDs during writes, it seems useful to employ TRIM. Does anybody know if this is true?



Thanks for reading,



bob prohaska



I've heard WD drives support it, but there's not much in the way of evidence for any performance increase.

---druck

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