P67 B3 support for SSD TRIM in RAID0 mode

[idata]

Hello,

This is my first discussion in the community.

I currently have a Asus P8P67 B3 with the 2600K. I am planning to install the 120GB 520 series SSD. I plan to do the foll:

2 x 120GB(SATA III) SSD in RAID 0 for os and programs.

2 X 2TB hdd in RAID 1.

I would like to check if will the sata controller in raid mode support trim.

Also if not supported, will the sata controller enable trim if i use a single ssd with raid mode enabled but as a single volume. Enabling RAID is important as I need to have a RAID 1 array for my data.

Please let me know your feedback.

Thanks.....

[DZand]

avinashpatro schrieb:

so does that mean that trim would not work when the ssd is setup as a single drive volume but the controller is set in raid mode.

No, the Trim command will be passed through as long as the SSD is outside the RAID array (preconditions: Win7 as OS and use of a Trim supporting SATA driver). So you can set the SATA Controllers to "RAID" mode, but the SSD itself has to be a non-RAID drive.

avinashpatro schrieb:

Also will the manual trim funtion work by running the intel ssd utility on the single ssd when the controller is set to raid mode..

The currently available Intel toolbox version doesn't work with RAID systems.

[idata]

avinashpatro wrote:

so does that mean that trim would not work when the ssd is setup as a single drive volume but the controller is set in raid mode.

TRIM will not work in this mode. If the Intel SATA controller is set to RAID, the storage driver used (in Windows) is the one for RAID. Intel's RST drivers, as of this writing, do not track LBAs ("blocks" or "sectors") when doing writes to RAID members (even if the only RAID member is a single disk (e.g. JBOD but controller in RAID mode)). The root cause is that Intel's RST drivers lack this capability at this time.

TRIM works fine with Intel's RST drivers when AHCI (non-RAID) mode is used.

It sounds like your system might already be using RAID mode (for classic MHDDs maybe?) and you want to add an SSD as your OS disk. Sadly you cannot do this with one single controller; you lose TRIM if you do. An alternate solution would be to keep your Intel SATA controller operating in AHCI (non-RAID) mode and use it for your SSD and/or CD/DVD drive, then purchase a Silicon Image controller and use it for your RAID volumes (classic MHDDs). They're inexpensive and reliable controllers (around $20-40). Please read Wikipedia's article on Silicon Image however -- there are 3-4 models of chips you need to avoid. The 3124 is probably your best bet right now.

avinashpatro wrote:

Also will the manual trim funtion work by running the intel ssd utility on the single ssd when the controller is set to raid mode.

thanks a lot.

"Sort of". SSDs have two capabilities: TRIM, which is where the OS tells the disk "I'm no longer using these LBAs" (done on a write or a delete of a file, for example), and garbage collection (GC). GC is an SSD firmware-level feature that operates 100% independently of TRIM. It'll work in any OS, there's no drivers needed, etc.. The drive does it itself, 100% transparently to the OS and SATA controller

If you can't use TRIM, GC is generally enough (as long as you have a decent amount of free space on the drive for wear levelling; don't go filling up the SSD to 90% used capacity and expect good performance!). Under XP, you can also use the Intel SSD Toolbox tool to ""simulate"" TRIM. We're still not sure what this tool truly does behind the scenes, but initial investigations show that it creates a large number of sparse (empty) files on the drive then proceeds to delete them. I'm willing to bet the software creates the files, internally tracks the LBA ranges it used for those files, deletes the files, then submits the TRIM ATA command manually to the drive for those LBAs. It's not as good as "real-time" TRIM, but it's better than nothing.

Does this answer your question?

[DZand]

@ koitsu:

All my informations I got from Intel do verify, that you are wrong.

The actual Intel RST drivers do support Trim in AHCI and RAID modes, unless the SSD is part of a RAID volume (RAID0,1,5 etc.).

Look here: http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031491.htm http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031491.htm

Regards

Fernando

[idata]

Intel RST drivers support TRIM for SSDs that are not members of an array. I believe this feature was implemented last spring (or the one before).

[idata]

Thanks Fernando and DuckieHo. I was not aware of the documentation errata update in question. Thank you for correcting me.

So to recap -- it looks like Intel RST supports RAID mode with disks defined as JBOD.