Do any controllers support this (particularly under RAID 0) these days? Googling this isn't helpful at all - just yields a bunch of year-old "is TRIM supported?" forum questions and misinformation that the Intel RST driver supports TRIM on SSDs in a RAID array (from what I understand, it doesn't).
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Current status of TRIM and RAID
- Thread starter eddieck
- Start date
Yep, that's what I've been reading too. I'm surprised 3ware or Adaptec, or some other RAID controller manufacturer, hasn't managed to support this yet. Either there's not enough demand for it or it's difficult/impossible to do. Any idea which one it is?
Windows RAID solutions do not support TRIM on SSDs in a RAID yet. Not Intel, not hardware RAID, nothing. Only some drivers allow TRIM: microsoft IDE driver (pciide.sys), microsoft AHCI driver (msahci.sys) and recent Intel or AMD storage drivers. AMD only very recently implemented this support, they pulled this firmware a few times though; official news about this still has to come.
But if you want SSDs in RAID and have TRIM capability, the only solution right now is on non-Windows software-RAID platforms, like Linux and FreeBSD; and even there support is limited in filesystems, but it does work over their software RAID implementations.
My theory about why adding TRIM on RAID is hard on Windows:
Windows recognizes a RAID-controller as a SCSI-controller, requiring vendor-specific SCSI drivers. Likewise, an onboard RAID controller set to 'RAID' mode (not AHCI/IDE) in the BIOS, will register as SCSI controller to Windows. I believe the API of this I/O subsystem in Windows does not allow using the ATA TRIM command, and thus the existing TRIM-functionality in Windows 7 cannot be used for these RAID controllers which register as SCSI controller.
Other OS are implemented differently, so wouldn't have this problem. So it's more of a Windows-specific problem. My guess is that support for this will be added by both a windows patch, and updated Intel/AMD drivers which use this new API, to also add TRIM on SSD in RAID configs.
But if you want SSDs in RAID and have TRIM capability, the only solution right now is on non-Windows software-RAID platforms, like Linux and FreeBSD; and even there support is limited in filesystems, but it does work over their software RAID implementations.
My theory about why adding TRIM on RAID is hard on Windows:
Windows recognizes a RAID-controller as a SCSI-controller, requiring vendor-specific SCSI drivers. Likewise, an onboard RAID controller set to 'RAID' mode (not AHCI/IDE) in the BIOS, will register as SCSI controller to Windows. I believe the API of this I/O subsystem in Windows does not allow using the ATA TRIM command, and thus the existing TRIM-functionality in Windows 7 cannot be used for these RAID controllers which register as SCSI controller.
Other OS are implemented differently, so wouldn't have this problem. So it's more of a Windows-specific problem. My guess is that support for this will be added by both a windows patch, and updated Intel/AMD drivers which use this new API, to also add TRIM on SSD in RAID configs.
Other OS are implemented differently, so wouldn't have this problem. So it's more of a Windows-specific problem. My guess is that support for this will be added by both a windows patch, and updated Intel/AMD drivers which use this new API, to also add TRIM on SSD in RAID configs.
Well TRIM works off of the NTFS notify delete command so it will only ever be a Windows specific issue.
Yes but it has to travel down the chain to the devices, and i believe the SCSI controller device is simply incapable of transporting this TRIM command, due to the way RAID controllers are registered on Windows. It's not specific issue to NTFS; NTFS does not care whether it is on SCSI or ATA, it will still send the TRIM command down the chain (usually FS->VFS->Controller->Disk).