Trim available in IDE and AHCI?

[idata]

After reading so many confusing posts about having TRIM...I am still wonder whether TRIM will still pass the command through IDE. 1/2 the people in forums says yes, and 1/2 the says no. I am still in IDE mode and never used AHCI. I thought TRIM was working until lurking in many forums. My performance never degraded so far using X25-M G2 02HA...still the same benchmark since the first TRIM firmware. Someone chime on this to whether I should enable AHCI.

[idata]

Hi! This I wanted to know too but couldn't wait for an awnser.

So I did some benchmarks with first the old firmware on IDE and then with the new firmware on IDE. Optimizing with the toolbox only worked with the new firmware but either way the benchmarks where exactly the same (read and write speeds, CrystalDMark). No improvement.

After that I changed the register to AHCI in my Win7 64-bit and restarted to the bios and changed from IDE to AHCI. After started up I ran the toolbox optimizer and did the benchmark again. I got a little but nice improvement from 230 read speed to a 258.

I guess the improvement comes from the switch from IDE to AHCI and not from Trimming...so I still like an awnser too on this IDE or/and AHCI trim question. I will stay on AHCI for now.

Ciao!

[idata]

What OS are you using? If Win 7 you will only have automatic (by Windows) trim if you are in AHCI mode with the standard msahci.sys driver, which will be automatically installed the first time you start Windows after you changed from IDE to AHCI mode in the BIOS.

Presumably you have installed Win 7 in IDE mode, so be careful to follow the next step first before changing the BIOS settings:

Start Regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci and in the right pane set the value of the key 'start' to 0 (=zero).

You can also use trim in IDE mode on XP, Vista and Win 7 by using the Intel Toolbox if that's more convenient for you. The toolbox (old version) can currently be downloaded here:http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SU5FNWJS http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SU5FNWJS

[idata]

Trim will work in either mode (IDE or AHCI) for XP or Vista through the Intel SSD Toolbox. Win7 will currently require MSAHCI driver to run trim. The larger question is why would you want to ever run in IDE mode with an Intel SSD??? In IDE mode you loose Native Command Queuing which can severaly impact drive performance. You also loose DIPM (Device Initiated Power Management) support in IDE mode which will result in lower overall battery life.

CrystalDiskMark does not support queue depths larger than one. Therefore if you are trying to compare performance between IDE and AHCI mode you are not going to see much of any difference. CrystalDiskMark is not the best tool for evaluating performance of a drive such as the Intel SSD that implements very heavy queuing.

[idata]

After reading posts here I decided to test the IDE vs AHCI myself:

Results with Windows 7 and IDE mode

Results with Windows 7 and AHCI mode

As you can see AHCI performs much better. Especially when multiple threads/application are reading small files at the same time (4K QD32 test). Enough reason to stick with AHCI for me. For those who want to try: you first have to switch on HDMI support in Windows 7 by editing the registry before you change to AHCI in the BIOS. Without it Windows 7 just crashes at startup.