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Intel Matrix Storage + SSD TRIM Pass-through?

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Hello!

I would like to know if Intel is aware of the issues with SSD's and RAID arrays regarding the lack of TRIM capability. More and more SSD drives support the block cleaning/optimising method aka. TRIM. Windows 7 has the operating system level support for it. As far as the user useres his SSD's in normal SATA/Legacy IDE mode this TRIM methid works because the OS can send the TRIM method calls directly to the drive itself. But if the user's SSD drives are in a RAID0 array TRIM capabilities are gone, because the Intel RAID controller does not pass through the TRIM method calls.

My question is that whether Intel is aware of this problem and if is there any effort to solve this issue? Are we seeing any driver updates soon?

Thank you indavance!

Regards

22 REPLIES 22

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

There is no vendor nor SSD drive anywhere that has TRIM working with a RAID device. Period. In order for TRIM to work with RAID, then the hardware vendors producing raid cards would have to update their firmware also. The only vendor i know that produced a SSD RAID is OCZ and you see where that product is on their spectrum products.

The s/w vendors and h/w vendors haven't gotten TRIM working on single drives reliably. Why would one think that they have gotten RAID working which is way more complicated.

And the answer is of course Intel is aware, but don't look for it anytime soon.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Hi,

Will TRIM work if I use a single Intel 160gb SSD connected to a SATA port on a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard with ICH10r setup with 2 7200rpm hard drives in RAID 0? If I want to get TRIM passthrough on the first 6 SATA ports on the motherboard, must I purchase a separate RAID card to control any 7200rpm hard drives I want to RAID?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

DZand
Contributor III

@ davem1979:

As long as your SSD is connected with a SATA Controller, which is using either the generic MS IDE driver PCIIDE.SYS (device name: "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller") or the generic MS AHCI driver MSAHCI.SYS (different Controller names depending on the chipset), the Trim command will pass to the SSD.