Help with 2 SSD's and raid

[crewzen]

I have a problem I ordered 2 ISSDSA2M080G2XXX 2.5" 80GB SATA II Hoping to raid 0 these SSD’S but I have heard that 2 of the SSDSA2M080G2XXX 2.5" 80GB SATA II will not work in a raid 0 with trim command because the ICH10R south bridge will not support the trim command in raid and the ssd has a bad trim command update. So is this a waste of my time. Are the SSD’S just a joke right now and if so how long do you think it will be before Intel has a fix for the ICH10R and the SSD’s? Using win7 Or should I send them back.

 

[SicKlown42012]

The two drives will work in RAID, but you'll lose Window's native TRIM ability. At least for the foreseeable future. TRIM is not necessary for SSD's to function, but it is very nice to have since it'll help keep your drives at peak performance. Without it, the drives will slowly lose some of the write speed, but with two of them you'll hardly notice unless all you do is benchmark them. My best piece of advice is to not install the newest firmware. Intel has pulled them off their site for a reason. Give them a month or two, and they'll release an update that doesn't kill drives.

 

[InvisiBill]

Also, Intel will most likely be releasing an updated driver that does support TRIM in RAID. Their current driver doesn't even support it, only Microsoft's generic driver.


The issue with TRIM is that flash memory can't be written unless it's first erased. With previous setups, the OS didn't tell the SSD which blocks had been deleted. As long as you had some fresh, unwritten blocks you were ok, as the drive would just use those blocks to write new data. However, once you filled up all the blocks (even if you later deleted the data), those blocks need to be erased before they can be rewritten. It takes time to copy the valid data off the good pages, erase the block, then rewrite the previous data plus the new data to the block. With TRIM and manual wipers, the blocks of deleted files are erased ahead of time, keeping the unused blocks ready to be written right away.

The SSD Toolbox will allow you to manually TRIM the drive as well, regardless of the OS or driver used, per Anand. Also, TRIM isn't actually necessary until all fresh blocks have been written and therefore need to be erased before being rewritten. The whole idea behind TRIM is just to clear up the free blocks before you actually need to write to them, so that it doesn't slow down your write.