[1pbfoot]

Hi all...

After having been hit by the Dell Mini 9's OEM STEC drive's flaw resulting in "Operating System Not Found", I installed a Kingspec mPCI-e PATA SSD that's compatible with the Mini 9. I could not get Win8.1's Disk Defragmenter to "optimize" the SSD (it did recognize it as SSD) and the command-line DEFRAG.EXE would give some sort of cryptic hex error whenever I ran "defrag c: /L". This was despite Win8.1's "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" returning DisableDeleteNotify = 0.

So, after checking a bunch of forums and running CrystalDiskInfo, I found that the Kingspec drive doesn't support TRIM. But after reading this OCZ forum post, I found that I could manually TRIM by using Win8.1's DEFRAG.EXE to consolidate free space then use FreeSpaceCleaner 1.0 (bottom of the page; needs .NET framework).

So, to manually TRIM, use the following method...

1. Delete whatever you can (e.g. TEMP, browser cache, old restore points, run Disk Cleanup, etc.) from all partitions.
2. [command prompt (administrator)] "defrag c: /X". ***
   • If you have your drive partitioned into multiple letters, add the drive letters & mount points for those letters as well (e.g. "defrag c: d: /X").
     • NOTE: "defrag /C /X" does not work!
   • This may take a while... First time took ~30 minutes with no progress indicator.
3. Run FreeSpaceCleaner with the whole drive option and "with FF" selected.
   • The FF option uses 1s instead of 0s.

***NOTE: DEFRAG.EXE gained the /X parameter starting with Windows 7, and that option will run on SSDs. For XP and Vista, you'll have to use a 3rd party program with a "consolidate free space" option, like Diskeeper. Also note that you want to run this on all your partitions, given that SSD firmwares do not store data/blocks/sectors contiguously (wear leveling, dead blocks, etc.)

FreeSpaceCleaner will fill up all of your available free space with 1s and will release it when finished, so be aware of that--you probably won't want to use your PC during this time & wouldn't hurt to reboot afterwards. But when completed, you'll have, effectively, TRIMmed your drive...

Enjoy!

P.S. XP & Vista include no support for TRIM, but the above method would work for those OSes with a 3rd party defragmenter. Windows 7 only supports TRIM on SATA drives using AHCI, and only for files that are deleted (no free space TRIM). Windows 8.x supports TRIM via more drive interfaces, but I'm finding conflicting info online whether it supports TRIM on PATA drives. (Doesn't matter in my case with the Kingspec, since the firmware doesn't have built-in TRIM).