# SSD Raid 0, no trim? big deal?



## Metaltree (Mar 16, 2012)

Hello. I recently purchased two ADATA s510 120gb hd's. The plan has always been to put them in a Raid-0. Currently, I'm only using one and waiting on the other one to be delivered.

I was unaware that TRIM is disabled in a Raid 0. I've read that Intel is now supporting TRIM in a Raid 0, however is that only Intel SSDs, or is it for Intel controllers in general? I'm using a ga-z68x-udh-b3 which I am currently using the IRST.

Also, is losing TRIM a big deal? Honestly the speeds are so great without being in a raid, I wouldn't mind just having two standalone SSDs for games/os. Thoughts?


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## Homeless (Mar 16, 2012)

The Intel RST driver that supports trim in raid0 hasn't been released yet.  It's expected to be released in the 11.5.x branch of RST.  Trim is a big deal if your drive has poor garbage collection and you often write/delete to disk.  I'm using two m4's in raid0 but my drive has adequate gc and i'm only using half the available space and it works just fine


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## TheOne (Mar 16, 2012)

Metaltree said:


> Hello. I recently purchased two ADATA s510 120gb hd's. The plan has always been to put them in a Raid-0. Currently, I'm only using one and waiting on the other one to be delivered.
> 
> I was unaware that TRIM is disabled in a Raid 0. I've read that Intel is now supporting TRIM in a Raid 0, however is that only Intel SSDs, or is it for Intel controllers in general? I'm using a ga-z68x-udh-b3 which I am currently using the IRST.
> 
> Also, is losing TRIM a big deal? Honestly the speeds are so great without being in a raid, I wouldn't mind just having two standalone SSDs for games/os. Thoughts?



IRST is the driver for the SATA controller on the M/B, and it is believed that the upcoming version 11.5 of the driver will enable support for TRIM with RAID 0.

TRIM is meant to maintain the performance of an SSD, SSD performance degrades overtime as the drive becomes more full and the blocks have to be rearranged more frequently when writing to the SSD, TRIM tries to keep an SSD organized by erasing blocks that are no longer needed, though the SandForce Controller on your drive comes with its own Garbage Collection which attempts to do the same.

You could set it up as a RAID and rely on Garbage Collection until Intel releases a new driver that enables TRIM support on a RAID 0 setup.


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## Metaltree (Mar 17, 2012)

TheOne said:


> IRST is the driver for the SATA controller on the M/B, and it is believed that the upcoming version 11.5 of the driver will enable support for TRIM with RAID 0.
> 
> TRIM is meant to maintain the performance of an SSD, SSD performance degrades overtime as the drive becomes more full and the blocks have to be rearranged more frequently when writing to the SSD, TRIM tries to keep an SSD organized by erasing blocks that are no longer needed, though the SandForce Controller on your drive comes with its own Garbage Collection which attempts to do the same.
> 
> You could set it up as a RAID and rely on Garbage Collection until Intel releases a new driver that enables TRIM support on a RAID 0 setup.



Thanks man. I think I'll just run them separately until 11.5 is released. When it is, I'll start rocking the raid-0!


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## Aquinus (Mar 17, 2012)

I'm running RAID-0 with two Corsair Force GTs and honestly trim or not, I haven't seen any performance drop at all. I was under the impression with latest Intel RAID drivers, TRIM worked in RAID 0 and 1, but not on 5.

Edit: Here is a comparison. I did a benchmark when the RAID-0 was new. I've been using this for a couple weeks now and I just ran one.

Before and after.







Edit: Fixed.


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## TheOne (Mar 17, 2012)

Metaltree said:


> Thanks man. I think I'll just run them separately until 11.5 is released. When it is, I'll start rocking the raid-0!



Good luck with it. 



Aquinus said:


> I was under the impression with latest Intel RAID drivers, TRIM worked in RAID 0 and 1, but not on 5.



Unfortunately not yet, the claim that the final version of RST 11.5 having TRIM support in RAID-0 came from the alpha versions release notes, where it claimed support was intended in the final version, but not in the alpha.

To check to see if TRIM is enabled just launch a Command Prompt as an Administrator and enter this command:

_fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify_

If it comes back as "_DisableDeleteNotify = 0_" then TRIM is enabled.


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## Aquinus (Mar 17, 2012)

You mean, this?


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## TheOne (Mar 17, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> You mean, this?



I'm guessing Windows still has the TRIM command enabled even though the controller can't pass the command in a RAID setup at the moment.


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## Sinzia (Mar 17, 2012)

I have two Vertex 3's in raid, and have for months with no slow down... I expect it would take a good long while to wear out modern SSD's in a raid.


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## TheOne (Mar 17, 2012)

Sinzia said:


> I have two Vertex 3's in raid, and have for months with no slow down... I expect it would take a good long while to wear out modern SSD's in a raid.



Most modern SSD controllers have their own form of internal TRIM called Garbage Collection, like the SF-2281 used by your Vertex 3's and my Agility 3 and his S510 and Aquinus's Force GT's.


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## Metaltree (Mar 18, 2012)

So what are your thoughts on it then The One? Just do it?


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## TheOne (Mar 18, 2012)

Metaltree said:


> So what are your thoughts on it then The One? Just do it?



Personally I would go ahead and set it up as a RAID, even without TRIM you have Garbage Collection, and presuming that Intel still intends to add support in RST 11.5 you can always install the driver when it releases.


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## chevy350 (Mar 18, 2012)

I've run all my SSD's in RAID0, the Intel 520's and OCZ Solid 3's, since I've had them and haven't seen any slow downs. Except for putting the OCZ's on the SATAII ports lol.


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## TheOne (Mar 18, 2012)

chevy350 said:


> I've run all my SSD's in RAID0, the Intel 520's and OCZ Solid 3's, since I've had them and haven't seen any slow downs. Except for putting the OCZ's on the SATAII ports lol.



One of the good things about the SF-2281 controller is that it performs well at SATAII and SATAIII speeds making it a good backwards compatible drive for those who haven't upgraded to a SATAIII M/B yet.


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## asphyxxya (Mar 25, 2012)

I would personally not use my SSDs in Raid0 until there is TRIM support for it.  You will probably not notice any performance degradation over a couple of months, but you could be significantly shortening the life of your SSDs in the meantime.  

SSD memory cells have a limited number of writes in their lifetime ("wear"), and once a cell has written a certain number of times it becomes "dead" and is no longer of use.  So anything you can do to minimize the number of writes, such as TRIM, will help keep your SSD in good working condition for much longer. I am sure the controller has some kind of protection against unnecessary writes, but I would still attempt to use every tool at my disposal to keep my drive performing well for as long as possible.


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## Aquinus (Mar 25, 2012)

asphyxxya said:


> I would personally not use my SSDs in Raid0 until there is TRIM support for it.  You will probably not notice any performance degradation over a couple of months, but you could be significantly shortening the life of your SSDs in the meantime.
> 
> SSD memory cells have a limited number of writes in their lifetime ("wear"), and once a cell has written a certain number of times it becomes "dead" and is no longer of use.  So anything you can do to minimize the number of writes, such as TRIM, will help keep your SSD in good working condition for much longer. I am sure the controller has some kind of protection against unnecessary writes, but I would still attempt to use every tool at my disposal to keep my drive performing well for as long as possible.  (Minor sidenote: I have recently published a research paper where one of our main foci was methods for further reducing writes to drives with SSD-like wear characteristics.)



TRIM doesn't reduce wear on the SSD. It only clears erased cells so when you go to write to that section of the drive so the SSD doesn't have to clear the cell on the write rather than the delete. It is to improve write speed after erasing data, not to reduce wear...


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## Super XP (Mar 25, 2012)

Metaltree said:


> Thanks man. I think I'll just run them separately until 11.5 is released. When it is, I'll start rocking the raid-0!


Good Idea because your SSD drives performance/health would have disintegrated alittle after a year's use.


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## Aquinus (Mar 25, 2012)

Super XP said:


> Good Idea because your SSD drives performance/health would have disintegrated alittle after a year's use.



TRIM doesn't benefit health, just performance on SSDs that don't use compression. Honestly, I dont see there being a whole lot of benefits to waiting. It will just require you to reconfigure everything when/if you decide to go with RAID-0.

Like I said before, the only thing TRIM is doing is clearing the memory block before hand rather than at the time of a new write to the drive. There are no more or less writes being made, just when they're being made. It is strictly performance, and on my RAID-0, you don't notice the difference between 1gb/s and 900mb/s. ...and honestly it hasn't slowed down yet. If anything writes are faster than right after I installed Windows.


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## Sinzia (Mar 25, 2012)

if drive has built in garbage collection, then raid. Its a pretty simple thing, at least for me.


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## asphyxxya (Mar 26, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> TRIM doesn't reduce wear on the SSD. It only clears erased cells so when you go to write to that section of the drive so the SSD doesn't have to clear the cell on the write rather than the delete. It is to improve write speed after erasing data, not to reduce wear...



The middle sentence of your post is close to what's going on, but I don't think you understand the implication of what you said does in fact imply reduction of writes.  Page relocation (a requirement in SSDs when writing data because data cannot be simply overwritten - something that is not required for standard hard drives, which can write in place) causes more pages being written inside the SSD as page writes are issued by the host. This is a phenomena known as write amplication. 

Write amplication will result in performance degradation on writes (particularly small request, random writes). TRIM reduces this write amplification by increasing spare capacity of the drive.  Increased spare capacity allows for more wear leveling which is extremely important for SSDs, since as I said before, SSD memory cells only have a very limited number of writes.  It explicitly tells the SSD's garbage collector where invalid pages are which then erases them.  Therefore, TRIM and SSD garbage collection work in tandem for better performance and write amplification reduction (TRIM improves the garbage collector's efficiency).


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