Solved TRIM on Multiple Internal Samsung 980 Pro Drives

I am a bit of a newbie with my new computer with its three Samsung 980 Pro Drives.

There are threads in this forum where others have used TRIM on multiple SSD drives in their computer.

On my computer, I have the following:



So I ran the Optimize on the C drive. Much to my surprise, it was fast, maybe less than 30 seconds.

I then wanted to run Optimize on the S and T drives but got this message instead:



Now, my S and T drives have very little data on them. Most of the data is in the cloud or still on my backup storage.

S drive has only 7 GB of data, and T has even less at 241 MB of data.

I am not sure if it is the lack of data or use on these drives or something else that I have not configured yet. What do I need to do so that all my drives can be optimized?

I have also set scheduled optimization to be run on a weekly basis. Out of curiosity, if I set this at 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and I don't use my computer next Saturday but do on Sunday, does it run then? I am assuming that it does. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Are all the drives connected to the motherboard directly or are those two on an expansion/ riser card?
Are the two showing optimisation not available using the same driver as the drive where it works?
Have you tried Samsung Magician to see if you can determine why re-trim is not available on thos drives?

As far as I am aware re-trim will only happen if needed and only on blocks where it is needed but the command/ operation should still run if the drive, driver and OS supports it, regardless of the amount of data held on the drive. This could be modified in the firmware/ driver of the drive by the manufacturer however, but I am not personally aware of any manufacturers imposing such limits.

@DigitalGoat, thank you for taking the time and effort to respond.

Are all the drives connected to the motherboard directly?

Yes, they are supposed to be.

Have I have tried Magician?

Yes, that was my first attempt at using TRIM.



As shown in the graphic above, there is no start button. And when I look at the Help center, I see the following:



There is no Start button. And the note inside the red box says, "TRIM: Click the Start button to remove invalid data inside of the drive. This feature is available only in Windows 7." It makes sense that there is no Start button.

So Magician in out.

Are the two showing optimisation not available using the same driver as the drive where it works?

I think this is probably the answer. When I got my computer, my S and T drives did not show up. In other words, I had no access to these two drives. When I contacted the manufacturer, we discovered that the drives were physically present, just not initialized (or whatever the proper term is) for my use. The expert technician then connected to my computer remotely and initialized, or whatever the proper term is, the drives so that I could use them. I do not recall any drivers being loaded. Instead, I believe we assigned letters to them, and then I had access to these drives.

I am working with this same expert technician this week on another issue, so I can raise this topic with him. He is a great guy, so I am confident that we will get to the bottom of this minor issue. When we resolve this issue, I will come back and report so that others can benefit from my experience.

If by chance, we are both scratching our heads over this issue, I will still come back to share what we have learned and what we have tried. My expectation, however, is that it is something simple.

---

Again, I appreciate your help. I believe you pointed me in the right direction.

I'm wondering if the technician remotely initialized these drives did he also format them as well. Look here:
Assuming you have a normal Win11 desktop......Right click the mouse on the Windows Logo down in the task bar. That will bring up a menu. Select Disk Management. From here you/we can view the drive status of each drive. Post an image of what that shows.

Thank you, @BamaInArk, for your comment.

No, we did not format the drive.

Although I will post the picture, I am going to wait until I speak with the technician before taking further action. I like and respect him and his abilities. When I came to this forum, I thought that perhaps I was missing something simple.

Your Simple Volumes need to be formatted.

@Scott, Thank you your reply.

When you say formatted, is it just straight formatting? Anything special? And I assume that I need to have the driver installed too?

I also assume that whatever is on the drive now will be lost. So I need to copy it to the C drive before formatting? I can suspend my OneDrive (I have three OneDrives) for a few hours, copy everything to C drive, format and install driver, and then copy back?

Although I will the technician do this work remotely, it might be helpful to pass along this information to him.

Stecyk said:

@Scott, Thank you your reply.

When you say formatted, is it just straight formatting? Anything special? And I assume that I need to have the driver installed too?

I also assume that whatever is on the drive now will be lost. So I need to copy it to the C drive before formatting? I can suspend my OneDrive (I have three OneDrives) for a few hours, copy everything to C drive, format and install driver, and then copy back?

Although I will the technician do this work remotely, it might be helpful to pass along this information to him.

Click to expand...

If the drives(S: and T:) were never formatted there is nothing on them now. The C: drive will not be touched to format the other drives. If you bring up Disk Management again you can simply right click the mouse on both those drives you be offered a way to format the drives. But if you've never done this before, although simple, you might can wait for your tech support guy.
To be clear you can't install a brand new unused drive into a computer and it magically works without doing anything. As you've seen. The drive must first be initialized and then formatted to be used by the OS.
Again this is very easy to do but it might ask some questions that if you are unfamiliar you might have more questions.

@BamaInArk, thank you for your comment.

"If the drives (S: and T:) were never formatted there is nothing on them now."

I don't recall us formatting these two drives. Perhaps he did, and I simply don't recall. I just remember him working quickly and asking what letters I wanted to use.

I do have data on both S: and T: drives. I have my Documents folder and my OneDrives on S drive. And T drive is my media folder. For example, the graphics you see in this thread are saved in Pictures folder on T drive. Eleven Forums, by the way, provided great instructions on how to move default folders to different locations.

I won't do anything myself. When we discovered that my drives were physically present but not initialized, the technician tried to walk me through the steps. After a couple of minutes, we both agreed it would be better to have him connect remotely and work his magic. What seems straightforward and intuitive to him was foreign to me. Rather than me making a mess of this situation, I would prefer to let him work his magic. At present, the situation is under control with some tuning required. I would prefer to build from here.

As Dirty Harry said, "A man's got to know his limitations." And I definitely know mine.

Here are pictures of my drives:






As we can see, there is definitely data on them, though, admittedly, not very much data.

I see now both those disks are set up as Dynamic vs Basic. I have never used a Dynamic disk so unfamiliar with that disk structure usage. Gotta read up.
To add after reading a little. Pay attention to the Note under Dynamic Disk under the article listed. "Deprecated" Dynamic seems more suitable for the Raid/mirroring type drive environment. If that is not what you intended then perhaps I would suggest changing them to Basic drive structure.

Also to note it appears you are using 3 Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB drives. Be sure to use Samsung Magician to check if these drives need a firmware update. Samsung has recently been hit with several bad firmwares on a few of their drives including the 2 TB models you're using.

Stecyk said:

@BamaInArk, thank you for your comment.

"If the drives (S: and T:) were never formatted there is nothing on them now."

Click to expand...

partitions S and T show as ntfs . They have already been formatted.

Is there a particular reason they are dynamic disks?

@BamaInArk, thank you for your comment.

My hunch is that TRIM does not work on dynamic disks. So that is my problem.

From the link you provided:

Dynamic Disks

For all usages except mirror boot volumes (using a mirror volume to host the operating system), dynamic disks are deprecated. For data that requires resiliency against drive failure, use Storage Spaces, a resilient storage virtualization solution. For more info, see Storage Spaces Overview.

Click to expand...

(emphasis added)

3
: to withdraw official support for or discourage the use of (something, such as a software product) in favor of a newer or better alternative

Click to expand...

I think we found the problem.

I think I would prefer the non-deprecated standard where I can TRIM the drives. From all the reading that I have done, TRIM seems like a good thing to do.

Does anyone see this situation differently?

SIW2 said:

partitions S and T show as ntfs . They have already been formatted.

Is there a particular reason they are dynamic disks?

Click to expand...

None that I know of.

Here's a Windows MVP Kapil Arya: Which one is better basic disk or dynamic disk? - Microsoft Q&A

Dynamic disks have been deprecated in Windows and Microsoft no longer recommends using them.

Click to expand...

There is a way to convert those Dynamic drives to Basic. Unsure what happens to the data on them however. First thing I would do is move/copy the data on these new drives to a safe location prior to any changes. Once the data is safely moved it is trivial to simply reformat the drives to Basic.

@BamaInArk, thank you for your comment.

Yes, I did not expect that it would be overly complicated.

My biggest concerns are if I can simply copy from S to C, for example, reformat S, and then copy from C back to S. My concern is that I am moving "default" folders such as Documents, Photos, Music and so on as well as my OneDrives.

I have a feeling that I need to properly move those folders to new locations. That is, I cannot simply drag them from one location to another. By properly, I mean I must follow the same procedure that I used to move them from the C drive to my S and T drives. And Syncing for OneDrive will need to stop and reinitialized.

I will learn more tomorrow.

You dont have much on those two disks.

One way is to back up what is on those disks first , just in case.

then try a dynamic disk converter

@SIW2, thank you for your comment.

Having examined the link you provided, it seems that the manual procedure is not overly complicated either.

Tomorrow we will either use the manual or free software. My intuitive preference is to go manual so that we can understand the steps in case something goes wrong and one less piece of software.

if you only have a small amount of data to back up, you could then do the destructive conversion with disk management then restore what you backed up.