Raid 0 With SSD

Huge sequential reads and writes (assuming a good controller), no notable change in access time.

And absolutely no support for TRIM which can mean degraded performance over time. How much and how fast is this degradation? That I would like to know as well.

Are you saying that you cannot use trim in a raid 0? I have not looked into this either. Anyone that is running SSD in raid 0 lets hear some thoughts of how things work.

RAID itself "supports" TRIM, but most of the RAID controllers do not  

What controllers do?

You are right to specify this, the problem isn't RAID in itself, it's the controllers. Therefore, it's probably just a firmware/driver issue to fix, not a technological limitation.

Right now, none I think, not even stand-alone enterprise-grade RAID controllers.

So currently it looks like 1 SSD will have to do if I want to stick with trim and maintain my drive performance.

It would be "safer", but I've heard people claiming they used their SSD RAID for close to a year without seeing any significant performance issues. If you are the kind of person to reformat his rig every 6-12 months, then chances are you would never notice a difference anyway.

Well now you got me thinking. I do end up reinstalling my os and formatting every 6-12 months, due to various issues. Maybe this could still be for me yet!

Question: I know that the more you format a SSD the less time it will last. What kind of effect on lifespan would you see if you format 4 times a year on an Intel X-25 M. (also assume regular usage erases)

Bingo, it might require a few more steps than just reformatting (like using a manufacturer's "factory restore" utility of some kind), but performance would be preserved. Just make sure there is a "TRIM" utility available that you can use outside of the OS so you can use it from boot (USB, CD, ...).

Most formatting utilities (not including quick format) do a zero-fill on the drive. SSDs actually need to be "one-filled" in order to be erased by software. By zero-filling an SSD, you basically cause massive slowdown until the controller erases all of the blocks that are now filled with zeroes. The best thing to do is use Secure Erase (or Sanitary_erase for OCZ drives if you want) as this essentially resets the volume bitmap maintained by the controller, telling it that all blocks are invalid and can be pre-erased. The advantage is that only the blocks containing zeroes will need to be erased, instead of every block. Check the SSD sticky in this forum for the first Anandtech article, it has a page on Secure Erase.

You may want to consider something like this:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?...

Using 160GB X25-M SSD WIN7 WINDOWS INDEX SCORE 7.9