Defrag/TRIM settings for hybrid hard drive

I have a OCZ Summit SSD in my work laptop running Win7 x64. I had installed the drive just prior to the firmware update that enabled TRIM so I was running for a long time with no TRIM. I noticed some pretty substantial performance problems after a few months. It became unbearable when, after installing an Apple bluetooth mouse, the cursor would occasionally pause while compiling a large project within Visual Studio 2010. (Also my compile time for this project was then around 20 seconds, up from 13 seconds when the drive was installed initially - though more classes and projects had been added so maybe not the best indicator.)

I backed everything up to my Windows Home Server, updated the firmware (it clears the disk which is why I didn't perform the update prior), restored from backup and performance hasn't been an issue for the past two months since I've done this. (And back down to around 13 seconds for a full compile for the same project.)

So in my experience there is a definite noticeable performance hit over time. This is the reason why I have not yet replaced the HDD in my MacBook Pro with an SSD.

With those specs, let's say you're talking about the Seagate Momentus XT. AnandTech has an informative review of the drive. Excerpt:

The size of the NAND was a shocker to me when I first heard it. I honestly expected something much larger. In the Momentus XT however, the SLC NAND acts exclusively as a read cache - writes never touch the NAND. The drive looks at access patterns over time (most likely via a history table of LBAs and their frequency of access) and pulls some data into the NAND. If a read request comes in for an LBA that is present in the NAND, it's serviced out of the 4GB chip. If the LBA isn't present in the NAND, the data comes from the platters.

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The potential for hybrid drives continues to be huge, what Seagate has shown here is that with a minimal amount of NAND you can achieve some tremendous performance gains. There's no reason for any performance oriented mechanical drive to ship without at least some small amount of NAND on board. There's also much room for Seagate to innovate. We could see drives with more NAND or truly hybrid drives that provide read and write caching in NAND.

For a real world example, I just upgraded to this drive recently on my MacBook and can attest that the OS and my main applications load up much faster.