The trim is kind of like the free counterpart to malloc. When the drive has been fully written, there is a lot less free space which constraints the GC and make

The trim is kind of like the free counterpart to malloc. When the drive has been fully written, there is a lot less free space which constraints the GC and makes it works much harder. The trim tells the drive to free up space allowing for less GC work. A big difference between client and enterprise drives is the amount of over-provisioning. A simple trick if you can't use trim is to leave 5-10% of the drive unused to improve the effective over-provisioning and improve worst case performance. The question of using trim in data centers might be due to interaction between trim and raid configurations because sometimes trim is implemented as nondeterministic (as a hint to the drive; persistant trim can cause performance drops unless you are willing to through in extra hardware to optimize it well) which causes parity calculation issues when recovering from a failed drive.