This is a pretty good deal. In their new state, G1 perform pretty much just as well as G2. In their heavily used state, they are about as fast as the top indilinx drives, if not slightly faster. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/11
it's now 500 bones, ugh. but would using this without it having trim cause it to fail over time? or just get slower? I could live with that but not if it failed.
Normally, I'd say the lack of TRIM is a deal-breaker, but since the drive was 160GB for a mere $199, you could simply set aside an extra 30-40GB of space for garbage collection. As has been shown in a number of tests on Anandtech, setting aside that extra area for the ssd's controller ought to keep about ~98% of all user's drives running flawlessly.
Kinda glad I missed this deal, 'cuz I'm broke atm, but the price was so good it'd have been tough to pass.
hmm...so if I raided two of them and had 320GB and left say 80GB unused, that leave 240GB of raid 0 goodness or there abouts...now to find some cheap drives....
but the odds are, with TRIM support becoming nearly a requirement for any recent SSD, you'll be able to find a TRIM enabled drive for cheaper than you could buy a non-TRIM drive and sacrifice 30% of the space.
I call bull, links please. TRIM works with Intel's newest drivers when the controller (ICHxR) is set to RAID, however, this is only the case when an SSD is attached but NOT in the array. The drivers/controller will still not pass TRIM commands to SSDs inside RAID arrays, but this does allow you to have a mechanical drive array on the controller with an SSD attached and still have that SSD be able to receive TRIM commands.
Further, my expectation for TRIM support inside RAID arrays is that a standard for such a technology will have to be developed before support exists. Essentially, due to the autonomous garbage collection performed by all SSDs, not only will the controller and its driver have to be SSD aware, and the SSDs aware that they are in an array, but also the controller aware that it has RAID-aware TRIM-supporting SSDs attached, and be capable of managing them. I don't see this happening without a protocol being developed.