When will we see TRIM on raided ssds?

[chedderslam1976]

I followed ssds for a bit when they came out; last time I was up to speed the intel g2 was top dog.

I have always heard that ssds don't get TRIM with windows 7, but I have always heard the word "yet" in the same sentence.

Is this something we will see anytime? Does the garbage collection of the new controllers make this more of a non-issue?

If I were to get 256 gb of storage, either one drive or two in raid 0, what is the recommended buy right now?

Thank you.

 

[foscooter]

You have some valid points. And you did your "research."

Intel will have to make TRIM available for RAIDed SSDs, as a chipset driver support. Other motherboard/chipset manufactures may follow. TRIM is part of Windows 7, but the chipset drivers have to make it available for RAID.

IMHO: Stay away form RAIDing SSDs.

This is even though my rig is set up that way, and the new drives with the SandForce controllers should handle the RAID fall-outs better than my set-up, I still say NAH. (I mostly RAIDed for size, not speed. But the "added" speed is great.)

But most of all, why do you want that much size? SSD work best as boot drives, with the OS and added programs only. A good size for a boot drive is 60-100GB. Then, use a HDD for your data/media (i.e. Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Gaming), say 500GB. Yet another, or external, for back-ups, say 1TB or more.

Since the new Intel G3 drives won't be out until 2011, and they are NOT SATA III, I recommend the following SSDs:

- OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
- OCZ Agiality 2 60GB
- Intel X25-M 80GB

If you have, and only if you have, a SATA III controller on your motherboard, then go with the Crucial C300 64GB. Personally, I'm gonna wait until Intel comes out with a SATA III onboard controller for motherboards, then I might get a SATA III 6.0Gbps SSD.

Prices for these the small sizes are far more reasonable, leaving room for the HDDs I Mention:

- Samsung F3 500GB or 1TB
- Seagate 7200.12 500GB or 1TB

Hope this doesn't make things more confusing.

 

[chedderslam1976]

Hope this doesn't make things more confusing.

No, good answer.

I currently have three spinpoint f1 500Gb's in raid 0 for OS and programs, and three spinpoint f1s 1 Tb in raid 5 for data.

Even at 1.5 Tb, I have almost 1 Tb full with os and software on the raid 0 array. I do programming, web design, and gaming, and I just use that much space. Tons of games from Steam, Adobe CS3, etc.

I just lost one of the 500 Gb drives and I am planning to go to raid 1 with the two remaining drives, so I will have 500 Gb of space. Since I am doing a reinstall, I will do it with the mindset of "practice" for a ssd setup, and will try to keep the drive use to a minimum. Hopefully I will get a better feel of what I really need drive size wise.

I have a EVGA Classified board, and after spending that much on it, probably won't upgrade the board any time soon. Some I am stuck with sata II. I wouldn't go to SSD for some time, definitely not until the new Intel drives come to market, and probably much later than that.

I really, really want a ssd setup, but I think the tech and prices need more time to work them selves out.

Really, I am just trying to stay current with the market.

Thank you for the input.

 

[sminlal]

I don't see any particular technical reason why a RAID controller couldn't pass TRIM commands through to drives in a RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 10 configuration. It's just a matter of having the smarts to interpret the TRIM command and re-issue it to the all of the member drives with adjusted block ranges. In those configurations, sector ranges are merely duplicated or split across drives, so the algorithm is pretty trivial.

RAID 5 is a whole different kettle of fish, however. The problem is that the sectors in a particular stripe across all of the disks are married to each other in order for the parity mechanism to work. If the OS sends a TRIM for a particular sector, the RAID controller can't pass it on to the disk which holds that sector because doing so would mean that the drive no longer has to retain the sector's contents. If some other sector in the same stripe fails, the RAID controller would no longer be able to reconstruct it by reading the TRIMmed sector + the other sectors in the stripe.

So I'd be very surprised to see TRIM support for RAID 5 sets, and since almost all RAID implementations support RAID 5 maybe it's that exception that's holding them back...