Upgrade motherboard just to get AHCI > Trim?

[idata]

I installed my X25-M 80GB SSD on an older system with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard for my Windows 7 installation. I recently found out that the 680i doesn't support AHCI, so I'm considering replacing it with a board using an Intel P45 chipset (Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P). Can TRIM function on a motherboard that doesn't have AHCI, or would I need to run the SSD toolbox? Can I even run the toolbox without AHCI? Is it worth upgrading to the P45 chipset to add AHCI functionality? What kind of lifespan can I expect from the SSD without TRIM? The system runs solidly right now, so I'm hesitant to go through the potential headache of basically rebuilding the system with a new motherboard.

[idata]

I'll have to find some time to try HDDerase and then reinstall. Thanks for the tip.

My board uses an NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset, so maybe they didn't have a license agreement to use AHCI when the chip was designed.

[idata]

I am curious since you said Windows 7 disabled defrag, is Superfetch also disabled? You can type in Start/Search/ services local and look at the listing.

[idata]

Superfetch is enabled and its startup type is automatic. Should I disable it?

[idata]

The choice is yours. Here is the blog from Microsoft that gives information:

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn't have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

[idata]

What did you do with Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive?

HD Tune won't complete a benchmark of my drive because of a read error (presumably from one of those damaged blocks), but it shows transfer rates ranging from 201.6 to 204.9 MB/sec for the parts that it does manage to test.