SSD Degradation?

[HaX]

Okey doks, so i just got my pair of kingston 40gb ssds and gunna be hooking them up to my computer.. here's the deal... My motherboard is the xfx 750i sli board.. and i don't think nvidia chipset support ACHI for trim..so.. i was planning on putting them in raid in the first place which doesn't support trim.. or atleast at the moment.. my question is.. what is SSD degradation like? what can i do to minimize this effect?

My planned setup was:

SSDs RAID 0: OS/Few Games
640 GB HDD: other games? apps? pics? Clips?

 

[sub.mesa]

When the drives are still clean (factory setting), create a partition smaller than the full capacity. For example only use 30GB of the 40GB disk. For your RAID0 this means 80GB raw storage and a 60GB partition. The 20GB space should not be used for anything, to allow the SSD to use it for itself.

This may be enough to prevent degradation. Though SSD degradation can have multiple causes. One unavoidable and harmless degradation is with random writes; a surface scan with HDTune would show a slightly lower and more fluctuating speed in those areas. This is normal; essentially you're doing random I/O now.

Reserving space on your SSD will be used to remap small writes to. This will only work if the space is unused before. If it is used, you need a Secure Erase or full format under Windows 7 to regain the desired effect.