Work Around to TRIM X25's in Raid?

I

iceredwing

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Oct 24, 2007
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So I was thinking that I could put a 2nd installation of Windows 7 into a small hard drive (2.5") into my desktop. Load that Windows 7 when I need to run TRIM for my X25's and have the motherboard run in IDE mode so that the X25's won't be in Raid when windows 7 loads.

I haven't tried this, since i have yet to receive my X25's, but i'm just curious if there is any reason to think it won't work
 
So you would boot to a 3rd HDD to run the Intel Toolbox Optimizer from there on the 2 SSD that comprise the RAID config w/your main OS install? (if I'm understanding correctly) No clue if that would work to be honest, I guess it's potentially less of a chore than backing up the SSD(s), doing a Secure Erase, and re-imaging the backup unto them... But not by much. :p No clue if it'd work, but I'm willing to bed it'll mess w/the RAID config and break it.

If you just leave some unallocated space on 'em by not formatting them to capacity (before ever using them, or after a Secure Erase) your need for TRIM should be mitigated to a large extent, unless you'll be constantly filling the drives up to capacity or writing a ton of data to them on a daily basis... In which case I'd suggest simply getting a larger drive, heh. The 256GB C300 is actually a pretty good value, as far as GB/$, lower than that of the 128GB or any of the new SandForce drives (much closer to Indillix and X25-M drives).
 
You should be putting the controller in AHCI mode; not IDE emulation mode. See if there is an option to activate AHCI. AHCI = real SATA while IDE is fake SATA with PATA emulation mode; no NCQ, no hot-swap, no command buffering.

You also talked about RAID but not whether this is RAID0 or RAID1. If RAID0 then your plan would not work for sure. If RAID1 it might, but why would you want to RAID1 with expensive SSDs? Makes no sense to me.

Did you leave about 10-20GB of unpartitioned space on your RAID array of SSDs?
 
Won't work, as runtime TRIM is invoked during normal write operations. Just having the "un-RAIDed" disks visible from the other drive won't accomplish anything- you need to actually write and delete stuff from the OS drive, which you absolutely DON'T want to do while the RAID is separated.
 
i thought the intel toolbox can let you run TRIM manually?

Also, why wouldn't it work under raid0?

Also I could run it in AHCI, and I know for sure it won't break the raid array by just booting from another drive. I just don't know if running TRIM (assuming I could) would damage the array some how
 
The Toolbox lets you force TRIM manually, but it still won't do it over RAID... It's primarily meant for people running WinXP or Vista, which don't have native TRIM support. What mavalpha and sub.mesa are trying to tell you is that if you broke down the array and forced TRIM on it, the mere act of forcing TRIM would re-arrange the way the data is sitting on the drive (it would write and delete stuff in order to clean up blocks), which will break the array. Essentially, running TRIM individually on drives that are part of a RAID 1 array would just kill it.
 
TRIM doesn't rearrange the data on the drive does it? I'm under the impression it cleans the free data blocks for future writes, hence why i didn't think there would be an issue since it won't be touching the actual data itself. Going into AHCI mode doesn't break the raid array. I've already tried this on my vertex in raid0 after loading windows 7 from my data drive instead of my raid array
 
If you break a RAID0, you do not have proper access to the filesystem; so TRIM would also not work correctly in that case. It might also result in data-loss, as you allow Windows to write to a (temporarily) corrupted disk.

The 'manual TRIM' using the Intel SSD toolbox probably works by writing zeroes to unused sectors; that would cause you to use up valuable write cycles on your SSD however. Real TRIM does not cost you write cycles.
 
Even writing those zeroes to the unused sectors would break the array I would think (if you were able to get past some of the other issues w/Windows individually accessing a drive that's part of an array)... It just doesn't sound like it would work, at all, but if you try it and it does then let us know. :p
 
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