Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox - What am I missing out on?

[idata]

I have a x-25M 80GB, upgraded to the new firmware, and have been running Windows7 on a C2D GatewayFX laptop with 2 hard drive bays - one running windows7 on the SSD and the other running Vista on the 320GB SATA HD the laptop came with. Its really cool.

Anyway, after I upgraded the firmware, windows recognized new hardware, rebooted, speeds look great - DO I NEED THE TOOLBOX FOR ANYTHING?

What am I missing out on? Is there some sort of justification for me checking every 2 days to see if Intel released the fixed version of teh toolbox?

[idata]

You might be missing out on the TRIM command. Depends which drivers you are using for your HDD controller (assuming you are in AHCI mode). If you are using the MS drivers built in to Win 7 then the TRIM command should be working in the background. If you are running Intel's drivers you will need the Toolbox to perform TRIM manually or on a schedule. Without TRIM you may notice a small degredation in write performance over time, as the free blocks on the drive get used up. It's not a huge problem IMHO and many of us got along just fine before it was implemented in firmware.

The Toolbox also has some diagnostic features and you can view the SMART attributes of the drive but there are other freeware utilites that can do this for you in the meantime.

In short, if your drive is relatively new, you may as well wait for the new version of the Toolbox and continue using your drive as normal without any worries.