Using TRIM on Your Pre-Android 4.3 Phone or Tablet to Boost I/O Performance

The latest version of Google’s Android, “Jelly Bean” 4.3, certainly isn’t one of the beefier updates we’ve seen, but it does include a couple of improvements that makes upgrading worthwhile (if you have the option, that is). Not long after 4.3’s announcement a couple of weeks ago, however, AnandTech reported on an important feature not mentioned in the official release notes: TRIM support. Can you say “overdue”?

For those who might not be familiar with TRIM, it’s an I/O command used to keep NAND-based storage performing close to its original state. By its design, blocks on NAND-based storage are never actually wiped when data is deleted. Instead, it’s marked for overwriting, which means when new data needs to get written, it suffers a performance hit because it has to deal with the bunk data first. TRIM comes in to trigger immediately after every delete to wipe affected blocks clean. If you were to TRIM an entire SSD, it’d effectively be back to its original performance levels (or at least close; there is the reality of wear).

Because of its importance to performance, TRIM is a standard for SSDs today. What it’s unfortunately not standard for are our mobile devices, even though those could potentially make better use of a performance boost than our desktops and notebooks. Hence, that’s the reason why TRIM’s addition to Android 4.3 is so notable. But what about those who don’t have a 4.3 device, aka: almost everyone? There’s an app for that, and it’s called LagFix.

I discovered LagFix over the weekend while looking for tweaks to make my ASUS Transformer Prime (TF201) a bit more responsive, and something like this seemed right up my alley. I admit that I had no clue that a TRIM command could be run on Android, but Android is Linux, after all, and Linux supports TRIM. Why Google waited so long to integrate support into the OS is beyond me.

Because TRIM is a low-level command, root access is required.

With the app open, TRIMing all free space is as easy as heading on over to the “LagFix” menu, checking off each option and then hitting “Run”. The process might take a few minutes or ten to complete, depending on your device.

One thing that’s important to note is that not all Android devices are going to support TRIM – namely, those that are a bit aged. I’d assume that any phone or tablet that shipped with Android 4.0 would be suitable, and probably most 2.3; older than that, support is highly unlikely. But, if you have a rooted device, downloading the app is simple, and free (scheduled TRIMs are included in the pro version of the app), and if it does happen to work, you will likely notice an I/O speed improvement.