Geek Software of the Week: TrimCheck
From LifeHacker – Make Sure TRIM Is Enabled for Your Solid State Drive in Windows 7 for Better Performance By: Whitson Gordon
“One of the best ways to take full advantage of your solid state drive (SSD) is to use the performance-maintaining TRIM command. Technology blog GHacks shows us how to make sure TRIM is enabled in Windows 7.
While using something like Intel’s previously mentioned Toolbox application to TRIM your drive is extremely useful, you need to make sure Windows 7 has enabled it first. And, while Windows is designed to automatically detect most SSDs, sometimes it doesn’t work as intended. If you find the
performance of your SSD is degrading (or just want to make sure TRIM is properly enabled), run Command Prompt as an administrator and type:
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
It will give you one of two results, either a 0 or a 1. A zero indicates that TRIM is enabled correctly, a one means that it is not. If you have a TRIM-compatible SSD, but find that Windows 7 hasn’t enabled the command, you can easily do so by running this command:
fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0
Note that TRIM is only supported in Windows 7, so if you have an SSD but are running an older version of Windows, it’s probably a good idea to upgrade.”
This week’s GSotW is “TrimCheck” a tool to test whether TRIM is enabled when you have a solid state drive.
“This program provides an easy way to test whether TRIM works on your SSD. It uses a similar method to the one described here, but uses sector calculations to avoid searching the entire drive for the sought pattern. It also pads the sought data with 32MB blocks of dummy data, to give some room to processes which may otherwise overwrite the tested deleted disk area.
The program will set up a test by creating and deleting a file with unique contents, then (on the second run) checks if the data is still accessible at the file’s previous location.”