I have attached an EXT4 formatted 32GB USB SSD to my asRock Deskmini 310 running ROCK.
I have scheduled regular backups to this SSD as well as to my NAS.
Does ROCK regularly TRIM SSDs that are attached via USB?
I dont believe the base linux distro upon which ROCK is based enables fstrim by default, however I cant speak for what may have been configured for ROCK. It is quite possible it is left disabled due to previous issues with some popular models of SSD.
Additionally, being a USB device, trim may not be supported at all without additional support (which again Roon may have chosen to add).
Ther is no distro upon which ROCK is based. It’s a built-from-scratch system. First the compilers are built, then those compilers are used to build every byte running on the system from source. The bootup, the rootfs, and the typical process table looks very different from any other distribution.
We do not trim external drives at all.
We also do not trim the database partition on the m.2 SSD, nor do we mount with -o discard. These both lead to performance issues. One might think this degrades the lifespan of the built-in m.2 because the Roon database is often doing writes, but deletes are extremely uncommon due to how leveldb works. The rest of the OS runs out of RAM. The OS is heavily optimized to not touch the SSD in ways that cause wear.
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My USB SSD does support trim. I have checked this on a Windows PC using CrystalDiskInfo.
Thanks @danny
I have set up ROCK to keep 2 backups on my USB SSD. The way ROCK handles backups means that for every backup that is written, one is erased. I have a large library (120k tracks) which means the backups contain many files and directories, hence my question.
Should I maybe connect the USB SSD to a Linux PC from time to time and run TRIM there?
I have just received the following feedback from Supertalent tech support:
Since the Roon Rock OS does not support Trim, it’s recommended that you connect it to a Linux PC and in this configuration handle garbage collection automatically.
Not the best of situations. @danny Could roon not include a TRIM sequence at the end of the backup routine, if backup is done to an external USB disk? That way performance would not be impacted more than by the backup itself.