looks like TRIM-enabled firmware for X25-M is out today

Pyrolistical said:
TRIM is only useful at the time of delete of format. This manual clean up will catch all the deleted data on the drive before you upgraded to TRIM.
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I see. So why do they suggest you run it daily?

And I just installed my OS yesterday, is there a reason to reformat at this point, since I can't do the manual clean-up? Or am I pretty much good to go with the new firmware from this point forward?
 
L1Trauma said:
They announced quite some time ago that they would not be enabling TRIM on G1 drives.
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Link? Who exactly is "they?" I've not been able to find an announcement from Intel about this and I've been searching for a while. All I've seen are post on forums that "they" have announced that the G1 is hosed. Or news posts like this one stating that Intel has merely "hinted" that TRIM may not come to G1. Has there been something more definitive? Or is this just a case of something be repeated until it's accepted as gospel?
 
The one I hear the most from is from Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=11

I would suspect due to their close working relationship that this is true, although it is not confirmed by Intel. In any case, the way the G1 hardware is structured, "fragmentation" does not have a very dramatic impact, while the G2s are impacted negatively, which TRIM is designed to fix. However, that hasn't stopped people from feeling as if their G1 is being shortchanged, which they frankly are.

Hurin said:
Link? Who exactly is "they?" I've not been able to find an announcement from Intel about this and I've been searching for a while. All I've seen are post on forums that "they" have announced that the G1 is hosed. Or news posts like this one stating that Intel has merely "hinted" that TRIM may not come to G1. Has there been something more definitive? Or is this just a case of something be repeated until it's accepted as gospel?
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cyberslag5k said:
I see. So why do they suggest you run it daily?
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If you're not running windows7 or your storage drivers don't support automatic TRIM, you will want to schedule the manual TRIM daily.

It is a bit confusing, as the program recommends all windows7 people schedule it daily too.
 
Kbomb84 said:
The one I hear the most from is from Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=11

I would suspect due to their close working relationship that this is true, although it is not confirmed by Intel. In any case, the way the G1 hardware is structured, "fragmentation" does not have a very dramatic impact, while the G2s are impacted negatively, which TRIM is designed to fix. However, that hasn't stopped people from feeling as if their G1 is being shortchanged, which they frankly are.
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Even the author there, though, is admittedly guessing and hasn't given up hope on a future release. It seems like a lot of people out there on the interwebs oddly interpret "TRIM coming for G2" as also necessarily meaning "TRIM never coming for G1." And so we hear word of there being some "announcement" that doesn't exist.

Saying that I am putting icing on all rasberry cakes as of Oct 31st is not an announcement that there will be no icing on chocolate cakes in December. ;)
 
The SSD toolkit is really for people without windows 7, or people that already have windows 7 installed with non-TRIM firmware and are upgrading to the TRIM firmware (i.e. my case).

Typical performance:

Before:
200907262229.png


After FW Update and one Wiper run:
asssdbenchintelssdsa2m0.png
 
I know it doesn't support RAID setups but I figured I'd update since it'll probably "refresh" my drives. ;)

Before firmware

asssdbenchintelssdg2916.png



After firmware

asssdbenchintelssdg2102.png
 
so 1.4 is the new one? so i just do a firmware update and then install the toolbox and i am all good?

i have windows 7 installed.
 
kinda sucks that you can't get real time TRIM if your motherboard is set to RAID, even though the SSD is a non-member disk
 
C-rizzle said:
Maybe they're suggesting it for Win XP and Vista users. Since it says the toolkit is for them.
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Everybody running W7 with a used x-25 G2 should run the toolbox optimizer against their drive one time, since TRIM only applies to files that are newly deleted. Once you run it once, it can be uninstalled if you like.
 
So its not truly TRIM.

Its like Wiper.exe and you have to schedule it?
Lame, I would have expected better from intel.

At this point I think I will wait on 6bps SSDs and real TRIM support when used in RAID before I buy any more SSDs
 
Right, their SSD toolkit software is exactly like wiper.

But the firmware update completely enables TRIM support too. Your storage driver just needs to pass the command to the drive. At this point, only the microsoft AHCI driver does that on windows. That will no doubt change quickly.

Add me to the list as another successful upgrade, windows7 with a X58 motherboard.
 
schizo said:
Right, their SSD toolkit software is exactly like wiper.

The firmware update completely enables TRIM support. Your storage driver just needs to pass the command to the drive. At this point, only the microsoft AHCI driver does that on windows. That will no doubt change quickly.
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So if I have a G2 and Intel chipet set to AHCI it works, but if I have something else it doesnt?
 
I don't think it necessarily requires an intel chipset so much as that exact driver.
 
I'm getting win7 tomorrow. I'm going to do a fresh win7 install on fresh 80gb g2, then install the new firmware and tools. I'll update the firmware, and run the toolbox thingymajig once. That should be all for setting up the new system?
 
thenewrick said:
I'm getting win7 tomorrow. I'm going to do a fresh win7 install on fresh 80gb g2, then install the new firmware and tools. I'll update the firmware, and run the toolbox thingymajig once. That should be all for setting up the new system?
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yeah, I would flash it first though, might as well
 
Ok updated firmware & used TRIM. I was surprised at how fast the TRIM tool works I was expecting something that would take at least a few minutes, like a defrag, but it was really fast.

System:
e8400 & Asus P5K-E on WinXP SP3

To flash firmware I set drives to Compatibility mode. Normally its in Enhanced IDE, for some reason I can not install Windows with AHCI.
Though it doesn't really matter as I don't have Windows 7 anyway, so I won't have native TRIM support.
I really think it has something to do with my 1st generation SATA DVD drive. (maybe b/c its had an IDE to SATA bridge built in it I THINK)

Crystal Mark scores:

Before:
247.8---85.25
171.1---58.64
24.09---61.59

After:
247.9---85.06
174.4---85.26
22.92---69.35
 
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L1Trauma said:
I just ran the firmware update and it seems to have semi-bricked my 160 gb G2 drive. EDIT: Make that a full brick, RMA in progress.

Retracing steps:
Changed to IDE mode as the readme suggests. Ran firmware disk, which confirmed the update was successful. Restarted, changed to AHCI mode in BIOS, Rebooted once, and got to the Win7 desktop. The OS requested that I mmediately restart -- I assume after reloading the driver for the SSD. When I restarted again it reloaded the driver again then explorer.exe crashed. Third reboot, same thing. Fourth reboot, now can't even get the Starting Windows screen -- just hangs. Using WHS restore or Win7 install CD now results in hangs and endless disk access.

The firmware updater would not "re-flash".

Thanks intel!
Click to expand...
It bricked my 80GB drive and there is a thread started about multiple people here having the problem. I was running Windows 7 too and I am having the exact same problem. I don't know if its just Windows 7 that is bricking the drives as some people are having success updating the firmware.
 
i had windows 7 installed and i did the update. i burned the iso onto a CD and ran it from there. updated firmware and then ran the firmware update again so it can verify. then i just booted into windows 7 and it did tell me to reboot. rebooted and install intel toolbox and did the TRIM.

feels a little faster but i mean, i can't really notice it to be honest because it was fast before anyways
 
So I installed Windows 7 on my new 80 gb G2 SSD. Everything went smoothly. Working very fast.
 
Did the update last night without issues. It did load a driver after re-booting into Win 7 RC. Re-boot was successful and I went into the SSD toolbox and no errors detected. Subsequently installed Win 7 RTM without issues. Seems I am lucky...
 
No problems on updating the 80GB G2 on my home box. IP35 Pro motherboard, Windows 7, running native AHCI mode. I burned the CD, rebooted and it did the upgrade with no issues. It does take it about a minute to scan each SATA port that has a drive attached. I did NOT change the BIOS to IDE mode or anything. Rebooted into Windows, it detects it as a new drive and installs the driver. Reboot again, install the SSD toolbox to run the optimizer once and ran the basic drive test.

All is good. And to those saying it's manual trim and you expect better..... It is ONLY manual on operating systems that do NOT natively support trim and even then Intels SSD toolbox has a built in scheduler for that. In Windows 7 TRIM is supported natively and is built in. I did also did a little testing copying then deleting files from it. Somewhat non-scientific but everytime after about 5 seconds the activity LED would flash for a few seconds.

You can also verify is TRIM is enabled with Crystal Disk Info - the "Supported Features" line will have TRIM showing if it's enabled on the drive. FWIW I also have the Intel ICH9R chipset INF driver installed instead of the one included with Windows 7. I am not running RAID so I do not have the Matrix Storage manager drivers installed.

All that being said - I have another here at my shop as the boot drive in a Dell Precision 690 which is business critical. I'm hesitant to update that one just yet until I read more on the problems people are having with some SSD's getting bricked. That Dell board has a 5000x Intel server chipset (dual quad core Xeon workstation), the SAS drives run on a SAS 5 RAID controller and the SSD boot drive controller shows as a "Standard AHCI 1.0 SATA Controller". I did look in Crystal Disk Info and it does shows the SSD as SATA 300 mode. I'm still going to be overly cautious on that box though since it's a business critical system and extended downtime is major pain in my ass.
 
Ran the update on two 160gb G2 drives on two separate systems. On the Dell D630 Laptop the update ran fine. The other on a Dual Xeon server running Server 2008 R2 corrupted after reboot with the same failure/bad SMART data as described many times in this thread.
 
I have updated to the last firmware too. Unfortunately the SSD Toolbox refuses to see the drive. I am using XP on a Nforce4 AMD system.
 
Can anyone confirm that TRIM is working with the Intel INF driver (not the Matrix Storage Manager)?
 
I'm guessing you did not bother to read my post, 3 posts above yours....

LittlePud said:
Can anyone confirm that TRIM is working with the Intel INF driver (not the Matrix Storage Manager)?
Click to expand...
 
You're sure the TRIM command is being passed to the drive in this situation? My understanding is that the drive will still show up as TRIM enabled even if the SATA driver doesn't support it.

MixManSC said:
I'm guessing you did not bother to read my post, 3 posts above yours....
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As far as I can tell but I really dont know of any way to be 100% sure. I do know that after the firmware update the drive activity LED is a lot more active with frequent tiny flashes when I'm doing stuff and if I delete a bunch of files after about 5 seconds it will flash steady for a couple of seconds. I know it did not do that before as it's a very bright blue LED on my case which I've been meaning to put a resistor on or change it to tone it down some. :)

If there is some utility or something I can check to confirm it 100% I'd be happy to check.

LittlePud said:
You're sure the TRIM command is being passed to the drive in this situation? My understanding is that the drive will still show up as TRIM enabled even if the SATA driver doesn't support it.
Click to expand...
 
MixManSC said:
As far as I can tell but I really dont know of any way to be 100% sure. I do know that after the firmware update the drive activity LED is a lot more active with frequent tiny flashes when I'm doing stuff and if I delete a bunch of files after about 5 seconds it will flash steady for a couple of seconds. I know it did not do that before as it's a very bright blue LED on my case which I've been meaning to put a resistor on or change it to tone it down some. :)

If there is some utility or something I can check to confirm it 100% I'd be happy to check.
Click to expand...

I just checked, and the ICH10R controller uses the same msahci.sys driver in AHCI whether I have the INF update applied or not. This is in contrast with RAID mode which loads iastor.sys
 
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MixManSC said:
I did NOT change the BIOS to IDE mode or anything. Rebooted into Windows, it detects it as a new drive and installs the driver. Reboot again, install the SSD toolbox to run the optimizer once and ran the basic drive test.
Click to expand...

so you kept it in ahci mode the whole time?
 
Optik said:
so you kept it in ahci mode the whole time?
Click to expand...

Yep - seemed to work just fine on mine. IP-35 Pro ICH9R controller. Only thing I did in the BIOS was change the boot order to CD first.
 
LittlePud said:
I just checked, and the ICH10R controller uses the same msahci.sys driver in AHCI whether I have the INF update applied or not. This is in contrast with RAID mode which loads iastor.sys
Click to expand...
how do you check that?
 
Maybe you guys should be successfully boot into windows before you change back to ahci from ide

that or just stay in ide/ahci the whole time when flashing
 
Optik said:
Maybe you guys should be successfully boot into windows before you change back to ahci from ide

that or just stay in ide/ahci the whole time when flashing
Click to expand...

My Classified's corrupted ssd was in AHCI the whole time because I took its drive out and flashed it in my other system, which is working fine after the update.

Intel has pulled the firmware download now if you guy hadn't noticed.

Download Not Available

This download is no longer available.
Click to expand...

Edit: Both systems were prompted to reboot after installing a new device. My Sugo build rebooted fine while my Classified build rebooted to a raw system partition, with the 100mb recovery one intact.
 
I believe Intel now pulled the firmware download link so the issue people is experiencing is real.
 
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