Old question of "should I use TRIM on my SSD raid array"?

[Rakivic]

The reason I am asking is, my friend recently told me that using TRIM on a SSD Raid array can cause a bunch of problems. I did a search on Google and I know there are lots of people that have been asking this lately but I haven't found a definite answer to it. Right now I have 3X Corsair Storage Solutions X64's in RAID 0 config. So should I use TRIM or not?....can it damage my drives?
Thanks

 

[daft]

i thought that trim plain just doesn't work with RAID. though, there is a possibility that things have changed for i haven't checked in the last month. for all i know though. i wouldn't try running it

 

[sminlal]

Yes, it's not that TRIM and RAID causes a problem, it's that Windows 7 won't recognize discs in a RAID array as SSDs and therefore won't use TRIM at all.

It appears that if a RAID controller reports it's virtual RAID volume as being "0 RPM", then windows will treat it as an SSD and issue TRIM commands. But that requires specific support in the RAID controller - not only to report the correct information but also to accept the TRIM commands and translate them as necessary before passing them to the SSDs. (For example, if Windows issues a TRIM command that says Disk Sector 100 is now empty, the RAID controller has to decide which drive to pass it to and it also needs to translate the 100 into the appropriate sector for that drive).

Since TRIM is a very new addition to the SATA command set, it's not really known right now which RAID controllers (if any) can do this and which can't.

 

[daft]

i suspect we wont see any hardware level trim integration for at least 2 years on a budget friendly scale. it could create potential overhead in the controller for something that hasn't been to widely adopted yet

 

[sminlal]

You'd think that Intel would update it's ICH RAID drivers to support TRIM in this way, since they sell one of the more popular SSDs that would benefit from it.

 

[daft]

one would think. but it would be far to useful. i have to wonder though, whether or not its a hardware level support and not just driver related.