@jmbissell wrote:
I’ve not followed the specifics of the problems w/ TRIM support. By installing R211, will any uncollected garbage and other errors from R201 be automatically resolved? Or do I need to do a secure erase and restore from a backup to realize all of the fixes in R211?
Very difficult to know what affect the earlier (SandForce sourced) firmware TRIM problem had on the deleted files on your SSD.
Let’s assume that some of them were not cleaned up. The new firmware will be unaware of the deleted files, and WIndows 7 only sends a TRIM command for a deleted file once. Those deleted files will eventually be cleaned up by garbage collection, and it is not a big disaster to have a few files in that state on a SSD.
Still, we don’t know how bad this issue affected a normally used SSD. The “torture tests” used to detect the TRIM bug are nothing like the way a SSD is typically used. The tests would fill the SSD completely with data files, and then delete some of them, and write and delete them again over and over continually, keeping the SSD filled to capacity. Then the SSD would be formatted, deleting all the files, which will trigger TRIM commands to be sent to the SSD for all the files. Benchmark tests were compared before and after the torture tests, and showed that performance was not immediately restored.
If you want a clean start, a SE and restore from a backup would be the best way to go. But without doing that, you will have all the benefits the new FW has as soon as it is installed. TRIM simply works better now, but the firmware cannot make up for mistakes of the past.
