Using TRIM on spinning rust

[bob prohaska]

Does anybody have experience/ideas regarding the use of TRIM with
SMR hard drives? I recently discovered I own one, and would like to
make the best of a bad (and increasingly unavoidable) situation.

According to the tests at
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/enabling-trim-on-external-ssd-on-raspberry-pi
it appears that trim is supported, but turned off on my (default) RaspiOS installation:

bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo fstrim -v /
[sudo] password for bob:
fstrim: /: the discard operation is not supported
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo lsblk -D
NAME DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO
sda 0 0B 0B 0
sda1 0 0B 0B 0
sda2 0 0B 0B 0
sda3 0 0B 0B 0
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sg_vpd -p bl /dev/sda | grep unmap
Maximum unmap LBA count: 65535
Maximum unmap block descriptor count: 8
Optimal unmap granularity: 0 blocks [not reported]
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sg_vpd -p lbpv /dev/sda | grep Unmap
Unmap command supported (LBPU): 1

Since SMR hard drives suffer the same convolutions as SSDs during writes,
it seems useful to employ TRIM. Does anybody know if this is true?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

[druck]

On 01/12/2020 18:47, bob prohaska wrote:
> Since SMR hard drives suffer the same convolutions as SSDs during writes,
> it seems useful to employ TRIM. Does anybody know if this is true?

I've heard WD drives support it, but there's not much in the way of
evidence for any performance increase.

---druck