Quote Originally Posted by johnw View Post
So far, everything I have seen with Ao1's data is consistent with Sandforce's explanation of lifetime throttle as a cumulative linear write limit -- basically, a line (bytes written vs. power-on hours) that it will not allow you to exceed (at least, not for long). Based on Ao1's data, total bytes written / power-on time gives the slope of that line as about 20 MB/s for Ao1's SSD. Once you cross that line, it throttles the write speed back to about one-third of the line slope, 6 - 7 MB/s, until you have recrossed the line onto the safe side. Then it releases the throttle. It must throttle the write speed to less than the slope of the line, otherwise you would not cross back to the other side of the line.

Given this explanation, what does TRIM have to do with it?
Normally, this is what I would also expect. Yet I find trim behavior to be strange. If no trim is available, the drive will erase blocks as it needs while writing data. What we know is that triggering a trim command will mark blocks for erasing which will be effective later just as with no trim. Marking the blocks would probably be writing a few pages which should not take too much so I suspect with trim there are other unknown things that are happening. That's unless trim is just a synchronous erase (operation which should probably have been implemented asynchronously)