The trick I've heard to use SSDs on devices without TRIM is to just leave like 15% of the drive unprovisioned (i.e. create a single partition smaller than the drive) to give the drive's built-in garbage collection plenty of slack space to work with.
If you're working with vintage machines they all have drive size limits in the 2-8 GB range anyway so you'll end up doing that anyway as you can't get SSDs that small
You can't just leave the space unprovisioned in general. It's a crapshoot weather the drive will automatically over-provision using the unprovisioned space. I've never personally seen one that does this. With samsung, crucial, and other major brands you need to use their proprietary tools to change the over-provisioning percentage (before doing any formatting/creating partition table).
So, to anyone else trying this, make sure to do it before you create the partition table.
Do you mean that it will automatically TRIM a block of all zeros? Or that it will itself try to parse filesystem structures and TRIM blocks that it can imply are un-used?
kalleboo|3 years ago
If you're working with vintage machines they all have drive size limits in the 2-8 GB range anyway so you'll end up doing that anyway as you can't get SSDs that small
superkuh|3 years ago
So, to anyone else trying this, make sure to do it before you create the partition table.
anthk|3 years ago
xmodem|3 years ago
rasz|3 years ago