This might be a really stupid noob question, but I am looking to move to Linux from Windows/Mac, and am about to install an SSD into my very old test machine for Linux distros.
My test box still has a working HDD in it, so no action is required immediately.
But my question is: once I decide on a distro and start moving machines over to Linux, what kind of manual care do I have to put in to maintain my SSD drives, if any?
For each box with a SSD drive and Linux as the OS, do I need to do TRIM manually, do I need to turn it on for a “set and forget” type scenario, or are recent and regularly upgraded distros able to spot a SSD and do the necessary without my intervention?
I guess what I’m really asking is: is SSD TRIM support pretty much standard now across distros, or is it something I need to investigate individually for each distro I install?
I recognize I may just need to ask this again once I settle on a distro, but since I’m trying so many – and may fully install more than one – I thought I’d get a jump on it.
EDITED TO ADD: Many thanks to all who took the time to answer. Now I know exactly what to read up on, and if necessary, look up how to do manually for whatever distro(s) I settle on. I -really- appreciate the help. Thank you!
Excellent question, and for people who have SSDs it’s worth knowing the answer.
Very simply, SSDs store data differently than HDDs, and when a file is removed, sectors on SSDs have to be explicitly cleared instead of simply waiting to be overwritten like on HDDs. Not doing so on a regular basis decreases the lifespan of the SSD. Crucial (a SSD manufacturer) explains it here much better than I can:
https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/what-is-trim
I have never read much about trim before. Now I’m curious about something: if an ssd was trimmed, is all deleted data lost? Is filling an ssd with random data unnecessary if we want so safely delete something?
What exactly happens when you issue a TRIM depends on the SSD and how much contiguous data was trimmed. Some drives guarantee TRIM-to-zero, but there’s still no guarantee that the data is actually erased (it could just marked as inaccessible to be erased later). In general you should think of it more as a hint to the drive that these bytes are no longer needed, and that the drive firmware can do whatever it likes with that information to improve its wear-levelling ability.
Filling an SSD with random data isn’t even guaranteed to securely erase everything, as most SSDs are overprovisioned (they have more flash cells than the drive’s reported capacity, used for wear leveling and the likes). even if you overwrite the whole drive with random bytes, there’s a pretty good chance that a number of sectors won’t be overwritten, and the random bytes would end up going to a previously unused sector.
Nowadays, if you want to wipe a drive (be it solid state or spinning rust), you should probably be using secure erase - it’s likely to be much faster than simply overwriting everything, and it’s actually guaranteed to make all the data irrecoverable.
Thank you for your response, I didn’t know about secure erase. Looks like my knowledge is a bit outdated.
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