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Date:      Fri, 14 Jan 2022 17:14:18 +0000
From:      Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org>
To:        Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: zero filling a storage device (was: dd and mbr)
Message-ID:  <523b6b6d-b17c-e632-a36a-a8c26ad61798@qeng-ho.org>
In-Reply-To: <YeGXejPepsd4aKiE@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>
References:  <77680665-7ddb-23c5-e866-05d112339b60@holgerdanske.com> <20220114023002.GP61872@eureka.lemis.com> <YeDryNdYe1S20wd2@neutralgood.org> <YeGXejPepsd4aKiE@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>

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On 14/01/2022 15:32, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> "Kevin P. Neal":
> 
>> Are we certain that an SSD won't at least track that there is nothing
>> written to a logical block and therefore it must be all zeros? I'm not
>> 100% that an SSD will always keep a logical block assigned to a physical
>> block. And I'm not 100% certain that an SSD won't notice that all zeros
>> are being written to a block and just optimize out the write.
> 
> It's tempting to speculate that an SSD could treat an all-zeros
> block write effectively like a TRIM.
> 
> I'll note that there are SSDs that compress the data written to
> them.  (Compression in storage devices isn't new.  Terry Welch's
> 1984 paper, where he presented the LZW compression algorithm, already
> talks about this.)
> 

May I suggest "man trim"? (From 12.1 onwards.)

-- 
Nothing teaches one not to try to stamp out burning thermite quite
like real-life experience.
			— James Davis Nicoll



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