"TRIM was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative to traditional hard disks. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from mechanical hard disks, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats (not explicitly communicating the involved sectors/pages to the underlying storage medium) resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs. TRIM enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, which would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance."As you can see, TRIM is a very handy feature, but not all SSDs support it. Please refer to your SSDs documentation to check whether it supports TRIM or try this method posted by Linux Mint Forum Moderator Vincent Vermeulen:
- Wikipedia
"Next up, you need to find out if your SSD supports TRIM. Just copy & paste the following command string to the Terminal and execute it. When asked type your password (nothing will seem to happen as you type, this is normal):
Did it list your SSD? Then it supports TRIM, if it didn't show anything your SSD doesn't support TRIM."
Cons
If your drive supports it, none. If it don't you might get a read-only drive or even data corruption.
Pros
Longer life-time and faster drive.
My recommendation
Enable it if your drive supports it.
"discard - Controls whether ext4 should issue discard/TRIM commands to the underlying block device when blocks are freed."
- Ext4 documentation
This post was written for the Linux Mint forum. Please ask any questions there (:
