Chris Hoffman has a good rundown on why Ubuntu Doesn’t TRIM SSDs By Default: Why Not and How To Enable It Yourself.
“We’ve covered why TRIM is important before. When you delete a file on an old, magnetic hard drive, the computer simply marks that file as deleted. The file’s data sticks around on the hard drive — that’s why deleted files can be recovered. The computer will eventually overwrite the deleted files when it overwrites their sectors with new data.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) work differently. Whenever you write a file to an SSD, the computer must first erase any data in the sectors it’s writing the data to. It can’t just “overwrite” the sectors in one operation — it must first clear them, then write to the empty sectors.”
You can run fstrim occansionally, you can put it in a daily cron job as Chris suggests, or you can add it to the startup list. Soon it will likely be a default item in Ubuntu and other distributions. Like the Radeon default audio thing, its a matter of playing catchup as things change. It is one way to see just how fast technologies are improving even if not obvious otherwise.
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