Windows 7 SSD TRIM and fsutil. Good information can be hard to find!
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Tutorial Information
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| Name: |
Windows 7 SSD TRIM and fsutil. Good information can be hard to find! |
| Submitter: |
NickTheGreek |
| Category: |
Windows Tutorials |
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| Submitted: |
11 Jul 2012 |
| Updated: |
11 Jul 2012 |
| Views: |
403 |
| Rating: |
This tutorial is unrated. |
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Description:
So, I wanted to know for sure: how can I verify whether or not Windows 7 has detected a solid state drive (SSD) is installed in the system, and has enabled the TRIM feature (which is very important to SSD performance)? |
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Tutorial Instructions
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It took me a bit of searching to find anything that resembled an authoritative answer. There is a lot of talk about SSDs out there, but quite a bit of it has all the hallmarks of over-enthusiastic people inventing information that sounds good. These days you have to be pretty careful about that when Googling for technical information – especially when that information concerns newer technologies.
Finally I found, in the comments to the Engineering 7 (E7) article Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives, several references to the command: fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify. When I ran that command, Windows returned DisableDeleteNotify = 0.
Hmm. Does a zero indicate TRIM is enabled, or not? It seems to be enabled, since if we turn off the disablement of the feature, that ought to mean that it is on, right?
Hmm. How could I be sure that this was the proper setting? What if DeleteNotify isn¢t actually TRIM after all? Even though the answers in the comments to that E7 article should be OK, where is the official documentation? I tried cmd¢s own builtin help (as you see in the screenshot) – nothing definitive there. I tried Help and Support in my copy of Win7. The keyword “fsutil” was found, but when I clicked on it, I was taken to this Technet webpage, which reports “The document that you are attempting to access is not yet available. Please use the following resources to search for information about Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.”
I searched Technet for fsutil references. The search allowed me to refine my search by operating system, but alas, Windows 7 is not yet one of the OS¢s listed for narrowing searches. So I tried with Windows 2008. I quickly landed on a page explaining the fsutil behaviour command. But DisableDeleteNotify was not one of the listed keywords there.
Next, I searched Technet using keyword “DisableDeleteNotify”. Only two results were returned: the E7 article previously mentioned, and a thread at social.technet.microsoft.com about using CF drive as SSD. Neither shows anyone identified as a Microsoft subject matter expert adding any clarity to the matter.
There¢s a comment under the E7 article which says “Correct, if fsutil reports that "DisableDeleteNotify" is 0, then Trim is enabled.” It was written by Craig Barkhouse. I can click his signature at the bottom of the post … but there is no biographical information linked to his account. Finally, I Googled his name. LinkedIn reports that he is a “Developer at Microsoft”.
I guess that¢s the best I can do, for now. Sigh.
You might think I¢m being overly cautious here. But in a time when accomplished experts like Mark Russinovich can find evidence that even inside Microsoft, bad assumptions have a nasty habit of propagating – even to him – I think it is rewarding to track information back to its source whenever possible. |
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