Trim question on Intel Z68 Smart Response Technology

[idata]

Hi, I just bought an 160GB X-25M and will buy a Z68 motherboard for my new computer very soon. I was planning to use 20GB of SSD as a cache for HDD, and install Windows 7 on the rest 140GB of SSD. Today when I was reading reviews of Smart Response Technology, I found that the drives must be set up in raid mode, thus TRIM was not supported anymore on the cache. I am wondering whether TRIM is still supported on the 140GB portion of the SSD. But none of the reviews mentioned this. Does anybody know the answer? I don't care about TRIM on the 20GB cache, as long as it makes the HDD faster, but I do care about TRIM on the 140GB os drive. Thanks.

[idata]

TRIM is a command submitted by the OS to the underlying disks. Within the TRIM data management packet includes a list of LBAs that the SSD should consider "free" or "unused", allowing for the eventualy NAND flash page to be erased. A simpler example: When an OS deletes a file or does operations that involve moving filesystem blocks around, assuming the OS supports TRIM (Windows 7 does), it will submit those LBAs to the disk to inform it "I'm no longer using these in a filesystem". So simply put, if there's no data on that part of the SSD (read: your NTFS partition only spans the first 20GB of the SSD), then the OS, obviously, isn't going to do anything TRIM-related with the remaining 140GB on the drive. Make sense?

In your case, all you can do is rely on the internal SSD garbage collection mechanism to do the best it can. I tend to recommend people use their SSDs in a JBOD fashion (read: no RAID) when using an OS that supports TRIM.

If you leave 140GB of the SSD unused (with or without a partition), this does have advantages with regards to wear levelling. But that's a completely separate topic and not what you originally asked.

[RGiff]

The way most people would set this up ,is use the 160GB SSD for OS and programs and get a small 30GB SSD to Cashe for a 2TB drive which would be in RAID because no data is stored on the 30GB there is no need for trim , the 160GB drive would not be part of the RAID so it would Native get trim from the OS .The only benefit of this is to make the 2TB run faster.

[idata]

"The way most people would set this up ,is use the 160GB SSD for OS and programs and get a small 30GB SSD to Cashe for a 2TB drive..."

Interesting solution; however, most Z68 boards have only 2 SATA III controllers, and we have 3 drives here...2 SSD's and an 2TB HD. So how would you physically set this up? Thanks!

[RGiff]

The Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 , Has 4 SATA 3GB , and 4 SATA 6GB Conectors , so that would be plenty of connectors to do what you are tring to do and still have a SATA for a DVD burner.