Garbage Collection/Trim?

If the drives you use have garbage collection then the lack of TRIM is only a minor setback. If it bothers you too much thinking that maybe, just maybe, your performance is only 6x that of a comparable set of 7200 RPM HDDs, then log out of your user account and leave your computer idling on the login screen overnight and let garbage collection do its thing.

What SSDs do you plan to purchase?

So don't connect your SSD to add-on controller, but connect it to your chipset controller instead, which does support TRIM.

So this garbage collecting program including on the Raid Controller cards, is it the same as Trim and will it keep the SSD's running at full performance like Trim? And if I do use the Raid cards garbage collector, can I also use Raid on the SSD's?

Peace.

From Tom's Hardware Articles, I was looking at the Crucial C300 series of SSD's. If I could Raid them with no problems and no performance hits, I would purchase either (3) 40's or (2) 64's. If Raid is a problem then I will just purchase (1) 128. These would be used as my system drive.

Then if Raid wasn't a problem with the SSD's, I would also invest in purchasing either (4) more 128's or (2) 256's and use in a Raid 0 for my secondary drives for games and video editing software or (2) VelociRaptors 600gb 10k's also in a Raid 0.

And I will be useing external backup in case of system problems.

Peace.

Garbage collection is an internal process done by the SSD's own controller, and is entirely OS- and SATA/RAID controller-independent. The only requirement is power and no disk activity for a period of time.



The C300 has a very poor garbage collection implementation. It's incredibly slow and not very effective. Add on the fact that the drives simply aren't as robust as Sandforce ones as far as being able to handle a lot of usage without losing too much performance and you've got a pretty poor performer without TRIM to help out. But even TRIM is only useful if you actually delete data regularly rather than simply overwriting it.

Out of curiosity, what do you need RAID performance for? A single SSD is very fast, and I can't imagine you'd want to spend money on RAID just for normal desktop usage.

I am using an SSD for both photo and video editing and it is very fast, just a single SSD not RAID.