Guest wrote:
here is what sus told me: The TRIM feature is not supported on this motherboard, since for it to be supported, we need the same chipset has the capability RST (Rapid Storage Technology) in the case and motherboard with the old feature, MST (Matrix Storage Technology) is not can use the TRIM feature. P5K motherboard has no such resources, since the chipset is the P35 (3 family of chipsets from Intel) and ICH9 Southbridge.
Asus Technical Support has no idea what they're talking about; not hearsay, fact. They're spewing out buzzwords and acronyms as if they understand the technology. They don't. The folks at Asus who engineered the system board, however, probably do. ;-)
TRIM is a data management command implemented in the ATA command specification; the motherboard and chipset have nothing to do with whether or not a drive supports TRIM. TRIM requires that a list of LBAs ("blocks on a disk") be provided to it via the OS or chipset driver; the command effectively tells the underlying disk "these LBAs don't have data in them that I care about any longer, you can consider them unused". The ICH9 southbridge (which is what handles your SATA ports) does not control this.
Regarding Intel SSD Toolbox and the "Intel SSD Optimizer" feature -- you probably won't be able to use this utility if you're using the older Intel Matrix Storage Technology drivers OR if your drive is part of a RAID array. But it should work if you're using the newer Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers OR if you're using Microsoft's native ATA/SATA drivers (e.g. the ones which come with the OS). AHCI plays no role with regards to this.
I'd like Intel to explain to me, however, how the Intel SSD Optimizer actually works. The software itself doesn't have any way of knowing what underlying LBAs are still in use/not in use by the filesystem (that's something the OS or the RST driver would have to track), so -- at least on my XP machine -- I'm often curious what the feature truly does. I have a feeling it induces garbage collection in the FTL on the drive, which is not the same thing as TRIM, but is way better than nothing.
