Would Enabling TRIM on a HDD Cause any Problems?

[Radish]

I'm kind of at an in-between stage in that I have my day to day working system, Win7 x64 SP1, installed to a SSD. However, I have a backup Win7 x64 SP1 system installed to a HDD. My thinking is that if the SSD ever goes bang! then I can just switch to the old HDD and be up and running again very quickly. I have been making separate boot partition images of these systems for restore purposes if I corrupt them. However, as I update the working system, which is on SSD, then I've been manually replicating that on the HDD. This means that (so far) I have been keeping two sets of separate image files. One image for the SSD, the other image for the HDD. Today I was looking at my notes for the SSD system and thinking that that system would work just as well on a HDD -- so I could eliminate keeping two sets of images for systems that are in essence the same system. I would also be freed of replicating the SSD system over onto the HDD. The only flaw I can see in this is that the for the SSD system I need TRIM enabled. So now I'm wondering if enabling TRIM on a HDD system would cause any problems for that system? Or would the HDD operate just fine even with TRIM enabled?

I'm even wondering, if I restored the system on the HDD from an image of the SSD system would Windows 7 immediately recognise that TRIM isn't necessary on the HDD and, hence, automatically disable it on first boot into the HDD system?

[jaclaz]

I don't think that TRIM will remain enabled on a non-SSD, but it is easy to check/enable/disable TRIM on Windows 7:

https://www.howtogeek.com/257196/how-to-check-if-trim-is-enabled-for-your-ssd-and-enable-it-if-it-isnt/

 jaclaz

[HarryTri]

Enabling TRIM does nothing on an HDD (I have an HDD and a program with TRIM enabled). Even if the program is stupid enough to try to TRIM the HDD I suppose it will just fail. Also, newer SSDs doesn't need TRIM at all, they have their internal procedures for this job.

Edited September 14, 2018 by HarryTri

[Radish]

Thanks very much for the responses. I'll take that it is safe enough to try my experiment and see how restoring a HDD boot partition from an SSD boot partition image goes. Didn't want to do it without at least trying to find out if the system would trash the HDD in some way on first attempted boot-up because TRIM was enabled. Searched the web for this information, nowhere to be found.

[Radish]

To reply to my own question in case anyone has use for the information.

1) Made an image of the boot partition of the SSD - TRIM was enabled on this.
2) Using that image, restored it to the boot partition of an HDD.
3) Boot into the HDD and check TRIM setting - it was still enabled, so Win7 doesn't seem to auto-disable TRIM on an HDD.
4) Changed the TRIM setting on the HDD to disabled. HDD seemed to have survived all this fine.
5) In all, turns out safe to use an SSD image to restore to an HDD system. My computing-life just got very simplified by knowing that.

All done!

(Interesting. This was the first time I'd used an HDD for about a year and half - have been exclusively using SSD system. Boy the experience really showed up just how slow an HDD is. Wow! And that's with a motherboard that is SATA 2, not SATA 3, so I don't get the full speed benefit of an SSD. Nonetheless, still Wow!)