X25-E SSD trim feature on Windows 2008 R2 x64

[idata]

I have searched far and wide the internets, but still can't get a straight answer for this question:

"After updating to the latest firmware (02HD), does or does not the X25-E SSD support the Trim feature on a Windows 2008 R2 x64 platform?"

If it does, what version of trim does it support? I believe the latest trim version is 7?

[idata]

The X25-E does not support trim so far, no matter what FW or OS you use. Actually SLC do not need TRIM that much as MLC do.

[idata]

"After updating to the latest firmware (02HD), does or does not the X25-E SSD support the Trim feature on a Windows 2008 R2 x64 platform?"

AFAIK the latest version of the firmware for x25-e is 8850 and SLC does not need trim support at all

[idata]

"does not need trim support at all" is not true.

All flash, whether it is SLC or MLC requires an erase and then write to complete a write to a block in memory. This is of course unless that block is known to be empty (i.e. pre-erased) in which case the controller can skip the erase and just do the write.

When a drive starts fresh (i.e. low-level formatted) all the blocks on the device are known to be empty, and the write speeds are very fast. After awhile, all blocks will be marked as having some data in them. Even deleting a file at the operating system level does not free up the blocks. The drive knows nothing about the file system formats and no idea which blocks it can safely erase, and which ones it cannot. This is where TRIM comes in. TRIM is a hint by the operating system that a particular set of blocks is truly empty, and can be "pre-erased" so that when a subsequent write comes in it will be fast. Without TRIM, ALL drives, even SLC ones, will slow down after use.

It is simply not true to say because SLC is faster than MLC that it does not need TRIM. An SLC drive with TRIM support will be able to sustain the the maximum write speeds for the entire life of the drive, rather than just only after it has been low-level formatted. In fact, it is almost the opposite is true that SLC NEEDS TRIM, since if you spend the extra $$$ for the performance, then actually you care about performance, and anything to keep that performance boosted is what you would expect from SLC drives.

Let's hope the X25-E G2 drives with TRIM support are coming soon. I won't even consider giving up our existing SSD solutions for a drive which will slow down after a week of our usage patterns. I am a software engineer on an enterprise application and I work at a company where there are hundreds of us doing this. We can burn through 64GB worth of writes in a week with the IDE (lots of compiles of small files). And all SSDs tested that do not have TRIM support eventually slow down, up to as much as 70% slower (which makes them even slower than the 10K RPM disks which are the low-end of our systems, and substantially slower than our DRAM based SSD solutions). The Intel X25-E appears to be the first option that might actually be faster than our DRAM based SSD solutions (most likely because of its I/O controller)... so once we can get one with TRIM support that does not slow down with use, we will be upgrading quite a few workstations (and all of our engineers will be very happy).

[idata]

The rumor is that the X25-E G2 will use 34nm MLC nand, theory being that enhanced process maturity will give even better ease counts than that of

the SLC nand used in the current G1 drives. I think I picked that up from Anandtech, but I could be wrong.

It would be nice to get an update from Intel on when the X25-E G2 will see the light of day. (Not to mention when raid 0 trim enabled drivers will be ready)