The way I understand it, it’s an automated job that sends the “trim” command to SSDs to discard all the blocks that have been marked as unused by the filesystem. My knowledge is a little patchy so I’m probably missing some important details…
When you go to delete something on an SSD, it’s simply just marked as being deleted. The file still technically occupies space on the SSD and the SSD will never simply overwrite space that has a deleted file on it.
So… by enabling the service, systemd will automatically send the trim command that tells the SSD to empty out all the space occupied by files marked as deleted which allows the SSD to reuse said space.
Nothings stopping you. It achieves the same thing. Some people might just prefer this since it’s easier and gets logged in the systemd journal? The Arch wiki lists some nice benefits of using systemd timers as a replacement to cron jobs.
The way I understand it, it’s an automated job that sends the “trim” command to SSDs to discard all the blocks that have been marked as unused by the filesystem. My knowledge is a little patchy so I’m probably missing some important details…
When you go to delete something on an SSD, it’s simply just marked as being deleted. The file still technically occupies space on the SSD and the SSD will never simply overwrite space that has a deleted file on it.
So… by enabling the service, systemd will automatically send the trim command that tells the SSD to empty out all the space occupied by files marked as deleted which allows the SSD to reuse said space.
So why not do something like
sudo crontab -e
And add
0 10 * * 1 root the funy command
Assuming your PC is always on at 10 am on mondays?
Nothings stopping you. It achieves the same thing. Some people might just prefer this since it’s easier and gets logged in the systemd journal? The Arch wiki lists some nice benefits of using systemd timers as a replacement to cron jobs.
Phew, I thought it would trigger the Cron Goblin