TRIM For iPods, iPhones, or iPads?

[Smallwheels]

I just read about TRIM support being included into OS X 10.6.8 and Lion. It is a program to clean up (defragment) solid state drives. That got me wondering if such support is now or has ever been made available for iPods and other such devices. It would seem to me that they need it more than computers because the drives are so small.

Does anybody know if there is such support for other iDevices?

If the smallest iPod Touches have just 8 GBs then would they not ever get to utilize all of that space due to numerous fragmentation problems? Loading and deleting movies a few times would probably leave plenty of memory areas messed up and unable to be reused. Perhaps in time the 8 GB iPod Touch would become the 4 GB iPod Touch.


Smallwheels

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until it gets sold and deleted.

[khisayruou]

This is my understanding of ssds/flash memory, please correct me if im wrong...

Defrag is taking fragmented data and placing them closer together, this is important for regular hard drives so the read/write head doesn't have to move as far making accessing data more optimal.

TRIM is for flash memory/SSDs, its simply a command that takes unused blocks of data and cleans it. This will prevent performance degradation of write operations over time. Flash memory will inherently fail at some point but will take a million plus cycles. Its a loss in write speed, not a loss in capacity. TRIM prevents loss in speed.

The more you write to the flash, the faster the cell wears out and thus loses capacity. Thats why wear leveling algorithms were implemented so that the writing to cells are spread out. So wear leveling maintains capacity.

New ipods/ipads use flash memory, there is no need to defrag it. Defragging will only wear out the cells faster. Now there are some instances where u may need to but its rare. That being said I no idea what apple has implemented, they may have put in over-provisioning, wear leveling algorithms, garbage collection, etc. Whatever the case may be I see my battery dying well before the flash starts showing problems.

EDIT: Samsung nand flash chips do use wear-leveling, I don't know about Toshiba, but I am sure they have implemented something or at least hope so.