M4 Garbage Collection?

ZodaEX

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I was wondering if the Crucial M4 supported Garbage Collection for older O.S.es that don't support trim. I can't find it listed as a feature on their website. Thanks.
 
I think it relies on TRIM. Sandforce is the only controller that I know of that doesn't rely on TRIM.
 
I think it relies on TRIM. Sandforce is the only controller that I know of that doesn't rely on TRIM.

Intel too. Oh wait, Toshiba! Oh, my bad, I'm sorry, Samsung too.

Usually depends on proper firmware.
 
According to their forums the M4 has excellent GC, Click for link. Its one reason I chose to RAID a pair of M4s. Don't need to give it a second thought.
 
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I think it relies on TRIM. Sandforce is the only controller that I know of that doesn't rely on TRIM.

I would stay away from sandforce... There was a post on the ocz forum by the support staff that said the garbage collection only happens when the drive is idle (this is fairly obvious) but they went on to say that is has to be really idle, like unplug the sata data cable and only leave the power cable plug in for it to work well. Don't know how much that has changed for sandforce drives but after having 3 crap drives I'm not touching them anymore.

Intel has pretty good garbage collection
 
Thanks a lot for the good feedback, ill be getting another m4 then. The one Ive got now blows away my vertex 2 performance wise. In fact, even my vertex 1 benches faster than my vertex 2 lol.
 
I was wondering if the Crucial M4 supported Garbage Collection for older O.S.es that don't support trim.
All consumer SSDs have always had GC built into the drive itself.

No exceptions.
 
I would stay away from sandforce... There was a post on the ocz forum by the support staff that said the garbage collection only happens when the drive is idle (this is fairly obvious) but they went on to say that is has to be really idle, like unplug the sata data cable and only leave the power cable plug in for it to work well. Don't know how much that has changed for sandforce drives but after having 3 crap drives I'm not touching them anymore.

Intel has pretty good garbage collection

I've had my vertex3s(with latest firmware) in raid 0 for a couple of months now and I know I've written more than 240GB to them, but I've seen no drop off in performance. I believe it is safe to infer that garbage collection is working just fine.
 
I was wondering if the Crucial M4 supported Garbage Collection for older O.S.es that don't support trim. I can't find it listed as a feature on their website. Thanks.

Every SSD has garbage collection.
 
Every SSD has garbage collection.

However without trim or understanding the filesystem GC can only garbage collect the blocks that were replaced because of a write. There is no way it will know files were deleted unless the OS / filesystem tells it (via trim) or it internally understands the filesystem.
 
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I would stay away from sandforce... There was a post on the ocz forum by the support staff that said the garbage collection only happens when the drive is idle (this is fairly obvious) but they went on to say that is has to be really idle, like unplug the sata data cable and only leave the power cable plug in for it to work well. Don't know how much that has changed for sandforce drives but after having 3 crap drives I'm not touching them anymore.

Intel has pretty good garbage collection

The keywords I picked out of this were, ocz, support staff, crap and garbage, all three are synonymous with OCZ.

Just saying...
 
garbage collection is just a way for vendors (starting with OCZ more than two years ago, I believe) to say "don't worry it's magic" without ever giving any insight on the way it works.
 
All consumer SSDs have always had GC built into the drive itself.

No exceptions.

My OCZ Vertex 30G didn't have garbage collection when I bought it. It's a consumer SSD right? They added the garbage collection feature into the drive with firmware 1.5. I remember specifically flashing to the 1.5 FW because I was getting sick of using wiper.exe to restore my performance. They claimed since the 1.5 firmware supported garbage collection, that use of wiper was no longer necessary to keep the drive from slowing down.
 
SSDs would always be extremely slow without GC.

It's a fundamental aspect that has always been there even with the first generation of consumer drives.

My OCZ Vertex 30G didn't have garbage collection when I bought it. It's a consumer SSD right? They added the garbage collection feature into the drive with firmware 1.5. I remember specifically flashing to the 1.5 FW because I was getting sick of using wiper.exe to restore my performance.
My first Gen GSkill SSDs had it the same as your Vertex but it was badly implemented on earlier units and wiper.exe helped it along.

I used all the same 'wiping' programs but GC was always there.

I've been in this type of discussion many times before and if you understood how SSDs worked you'd realize why it's necessary.
 
Algorithms using the overprovisioned NAND have always been there, but it's debatable if that's garbage collection.
 
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