Tempted...

[hostage67]

Let me just say that I have used 100% of my raid drives several times over at this point and still get 480mb/s when speed testing the drive. This would suggest that Trim is working at least on my setup.

G1.Sniper 3 Motherboard
M4 120gb SSD's

[Sephious]

Originally Posted by PommieB

I hope that trim is working for you, it may do, but without properly testing for trim it's hard to say, I've done a fair bit of research on the subject with a mixed amount of success, here's a recent link from the Intel community forum on the subject.

http://communities.intel.com/thread/29704

It's ambiguous at the best, as you ran your raid0, previous to using the the latest rst driver, did you see a noticeable difference. I can't seem to get a possible answer one way or the other. Changed that last sentence, I've been trying to get a clear answer to raid0 and trim for years.

Here's another link I found, nothing positive there either.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2256066

I'm not trying to say you're wrong, I'm just saying what made sense. It probably isn't working according to those links.

And again, like you said, with the garbage collection these days TRIM is pretty much a moot point anyway.

[PommieB]

I hope trim is working in raid0, personally I don't think it is in the majority of cases, you need to test specifically for trim to determine whether it's working or not, speed isn't an indication. It's a moot point anyway with GC working the way it is. The M4 aren't the best ssd to test trim because of it's aggressive GC, Sandforce drives would would give a better indication, hard to say anyway.

The indications are that Raid 0 with ssd drives doesn't have the issues it used to have. The " experts " have always said that there would come a point where trim would not be needed on ssd drives, maybe the technology close to that point now.

[hostage67]

Originally Posted by PommieB

I hope trim is working in raid0, personally I don't think it is in the majority of cases, you need to test specifically for trim to determine whether it's working or not, speed isn't an indication. It's a moot point anyway with GC working the way it is. The M4 aren't the best ssd to test trim because of it's aggressive GC, Sandforce drives would would give a better indication, hard to say anyway.

The indications are that Raid 0 with ssd drives doesn't have the issues it used to have. The " experts " have always said that there would come a point where trim would not be needed on ssd drives, maybe the technology close to that point now.

I would disagree with your points there. Speed is very much the purpose of Trim. Also it is important to note that TRIM and Garbage Collection are not separate entities, they are actually related...

Originally Posted by from the wiki

TRIM was introduced soon after SSDs started to become an affordable alternative to traditional hard disks. Because low-level operation of SSDs differs significantly from mechanical hard disks, the typical way in which operating systems handle operations like deletes and formats (not explicitly communicating the involved sectors/pages to the underlying storage medium) resulted in unanticipated progressive performance degradation of write operations on SSDs.[2] TRIM enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, which would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.[3]

TRIM was introduced in order to basically handle the garbage collection on SSD's in order to reduce the performance degradation over time. This was due to how the drives actually wrote data to the SSD which is different than how a platter drive handles this.

Even if it is not actually using the TRIM command, an aggressive garbage collection that results in the same benefits would essentially be the same thing.

[PommieB]

I know perfectly well how trim works and it doesn't trim anything, it wasn't introduced to act as garbage collection, it was introduced as a aid to GC, the only trimming done on a ssd drive is by the controller, not the trim function. What the the trim function does is let the controller know that it needs to trim the drive sooner than it was originally designed to do , it also marks the memory blocks that require trimming by the controller, this saves the controller having to do the wear leveling operations which are slow and use up write cycles.

Early drives suffered badly because the GC didn't work as well as it does today, introducing trim allowed it to do it's job easier and sooner, which brought the ssds back up to speed before the ssd got to the stage where the GC was ineffective. Yes it had a lot to with speed in the early years of client ssd drives, not so much now.

Most of that Wiki stuff your quoting is out of date and not necessarily accurate.

As far as Trim and Raid0 concerned, that's to with intel raid chip or any other raid chip on the motherboard, if it's not compatible with the trim command, trim will not work on the raid0 array.

All your saying is the same things I've said earlier, I also know the differences on how platter drives and ssd drives work, I can't see the point of your argument, trim may quite well be working on your set-up, but you can't tell that by speed improvement, all you can tell is GC is more efficient than it was a couple of years ago.

[hostage67]

My point is simply this...

Trim - Tells it to garbage collect earlier
GC - Aggressive garbage collecting

In the end it's the same thing, both are collecting the garbage much more often. The differences between the two are minimal in the end. So I don't see the point in debating Trim vs Aggressive Garbage collection in RAID-0, it doesn't matter if the end result is the same. And the main reason this was ever an issue was due to the reduced speed. The reduced life isn't really much of a factor as the life expectancy is still longer than a normal platter drive at this point. Yes TRIM is probably slightly more efficient since it is more accurate. But in the end that efficiency is a minor difference.

[ORL]

I just wanted to say that this thread cursed my M4. It died this last weekend. Haven't done any real diagnostics on it yet but the problem does lie on it for sure and have moved back to adisk drive for now. I just need to stop saying how something of mine has not failed me yet.... Go figure.

I still fully recommend the M4 however as this was a fantastic drive, and chances are extremely good the real damage was caused by a thunderstorm despite my UPS and PSU living through it. The issues occurred after one so I only assume as of yet.

[PommieB]

Have you tried re-cycling the ssd drive, is it recognized at all by the computer, as much as I like ssd drives I keep a up to date cloned copy on a standard disk drive, I only have to swap out the drives and I'm back in business, I don't take risks with my data. I did the same with my OS drive on conventional Disk drives.

[hostage67]

Originally Posted by PommieB

Have you tried re-cycling the ssd drive, is it recognized at all by the computer, as much as I like ssd drives I keep a up to date cloned copy on a standard disk drive, I only have to swap out the drives and I'm back in business, I don't take risks with my data. I did the same with my OS drive on conventional Disk drives.

That is never a bad thing, and the price on standard disks for storage space makes this a very inexpensive way to backup your data.

[ORL]

I ended up going through the works. Gave it a complete disconnect. Powered up, got nothing. Motherboard showed it then, formatted it and reinstalled OS. Drive stops showing up in BIOs. Unplugged and In again it shows up till I boot then BSOD once in Windows Drive stops showing up again. Blah blah. She is done.

No worries though, Next purchase will still be an M4 and just getting a much bigger drive this time.

[PommieB]

So the drive is shot, can you rma it, how long have you had it, usually if it doesn't come back after recycling, it needs rmaing.

I generally buy a larger drive than I need, they perform much better 50 to 60% full, plus you have extra space that can be used as over-provisioning, the more room you've got the better the drive will perform.