Garbage collection?

Hi:

I just successfully installed a new Crucial M4 SSD into my Dell Precision T3400. Works great. I have read some blogs about "garbage collection" that is required to delete data no longer needed by the drive. Do I need to do something or is that old technology. I am enjoying the speed of the new SSD and I don't want to bog it down later becausee of some detail overlooked.

Thanks for the help!

TRIM should maintain drive performance for you.

TRIM is not supported when you have drives in a RAID array and that's when Garbage Collection should be used to maintain drive performance.

Garbage Collection runs automatically when you "Log off" from your pc.
Depending on your usage you probably don't need to do it more than a couple of times a month.

I have 2 SSDs in RAID so I do it once or twice a week.

I have to be logged off or reboot in Safe Mode for Garbage Collection to work with my drives (OCZ Vertex 2) and Windows 7.

I can open Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) immediately after booting into Windows and there will be 190 Windows Services listed (half running, half stopped) and I haven’t yet opened or ran a single program.

GC needs very low level idle in order to activate.

Hi - thanks for the comments.

I am using XP pro. I know very little about this which is why I am trying to learn if I need to do anything else to keep my SSD running at peak performance.

Do I use Trim on an XP system? I checked the Crucial website, it didn't offer any utility programs at all.