Does my SB (2x128 raid 0 SSD) have TRIM?

Hey,

I searched and haven't found a clear answer.

I read that RAID 0 can't have TRIM enabled.
I also read that it is possible within the last 2 months.
I checked and DisableDeleteNotify=0, which means that TRIM is enabled on my system.

But does it really work with the raid? is there a way to be sure?
Can I fill my SSDs without worrying?

Thanks,
Gil.

 

Intel Rapid Storage Technology 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume. A defect was filed to correct the information in the Help file that states that TRIM is supported on RAID volumes. You can fill SSDs. For confirmation, you can disconnect all other drives except SSD from the system, and go into BIOS to see if it is there.

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Web Design London

 

No, you do not have working TRIM.
For TRIM to work, the OS, drivers and drive all have to support it, and you must run the controller in AHCI compatible mode.
DisableDeleteNotify=0 only means that the OS doesn't have it disabled -- the three other factors still come into play, and the stopping point here is the drivers, which do not support TRIM for striped disks.

I.e. the OS sends a TRIM command, but the driver can't do anything about it, so it drops it. You will get slightly better performance by setting DisableDeleteNotify to 1 -- this is exactly the situation that this registry flag is for. By changing it, the OS no longer has to waste time on sending TRIM commands that aren't acted on, and won't have to keep tally of which blocks are deleted but not yet sent a TRIM command for.

 

You can fill SSDs, but do worry. Write amplification increases logarithmically the closer a drive is to becoming full. The more space you leave unused on the drive, the less of a problem it becomes. The only acceptable use of a near-full SSD drive is for read-only; for frequent write operations (including OS initiated background writes), it can easily be slower than a HDD of the same capacity(!).

 

How do you change DisableDeleteNotify to 1?

 

unraid the thing

 

No, no, no. You didn't understand what he asked, and answered the exact opposite.


To set DisableDeleteNotify to 1, thus disabling TRIM in the OS when the drive doesn't support it anyhow, do this:

- click the start button
- enter cmd (but don't press return)
- press shift-ctrl-return
- say yes to the UAC prompt to allow it
You now have a command prompt with admin privileges
- enter:
fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 1
- hit enter

That's it. You have now disabled TRIM in the OS, which is a good thing whenever your drives or drivers don't support TRIM (as is the case when using RAID 0).

If you need to revert, do the same but with DisableDeleteNotify 0

 

No - TRIM for RAID0 volumes isn't supported by Intel RST.

 

He specifically asked about Raid0. The answer is "no".

 

I still don't understand how to varify if I have, or don't have TRIM.

I'm using Intel Rapid Storage Tech 10.1.
How do you know it's not working? who says my drivers and drive don't support it?
Can't I see in the Disk Information section, if my drives support it?

It's a TOSHIBA THNSNC128GMMJ. Google says it does support TRIM.

So my drive supports it, my OS also. What about my drivers?
And how do I run the controller in AHCI mode?


Thanks for the help!
Gil.

What about this: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/03/23/intel-releases-trim-for-raid/1

 

^Maybe this will help.

Are your SSD's in a RAID array? If so, the answer is "no, you don't have trim".

If you break the array, they will run with TRIM.

If you hack the bios, you can enable AHCI, that also will enable trim (and will also break the array).

The garbage collection that works with RAID array seems to be effective. There are a gazillion threads on this.

 

... unless you run Linux and RAID 1 with slightly modified dmraid and drive-based softraid.
(With RAID 1, a TRIM command sent to one drive can safely be sent to all the others too -- the only difference is the RAID marker, and if you erase that, you have bigger problems than marking a block for erasure...)

 

That's well over a year old - they were just guessing about what RST would support. Read my lips (I have a smile on my face ) -- RST does NOT support TRIM for RAID0.

 

Considering op checked the disabledeletenotify key its safe to say he's running windows.

 

Thank you very much! Talk about being spoon-fed the answer. You get a +1 from me for, well, taking something I didn't know I needed to do, to something I learned I needed to do, but had no idea how, to all but making the keystrokes for me remotely. Thanks.

 

Thanks for all the answers!
So... bottom line,

I do not have TRIM with my raid 0.
What should I do now?

Option 1, No TRIM: If I remain with the current setup, I should change DisableDeleteNotify to 1, obviously. and also try to avoid filling my SSDs.

Option 2, TRIM: If I want to have TRIM, I should.... break the raid? use the 2 SSDs separately? obviously I have to reinstall everything.

Which option is better?

 

Option 3: Just leave it alone

As is covered in a bunch of other threads, the garbage collection works pretty well, just don't let the drive get too full (say, above 75%).

 

Yep, changing DisableDeleteNotify to 1 isn't going to make a large impact, so leaving it alone is fine. It's beneficial, but not enough that it's more than a tweak.

 

Changing it to 1 costs nothing.
If it doesn't have any downgrades, why shouldnt I do it?

Right now I have 100GB free out of 222GB... need to be careful now :/

 

The only reason I can think of is if you later switch the drive to one that isn't RAIDed, or hack the BIOS, break the RAID and run the drives individually in AHCI mode.
Then you'd want it back to zero so you can take advantage of TRIM.
But otherwise, switch it, and enjoy a tiny tiny bit of speed boost.

As for 100GB free, that should be plenty for garbage collection to work with. It's when you get into the >90% full area that SSDs tend to slow down for writes, and eventually you get frequent stalls when the drive works its pants off shuffling data around to free enough consecutive blocks that an entire sector can be erased. You're nowhere near that!

 

Thanks a lot for your detailed answers arth1

One last thing,
If I ever get to >90& usage and then delete some data back to lets say 60% usage. will I get the good performances once again?

 

^Yes.

10char

 

Hi - do you still have the recovery partition? My SA's recovery partition will be deleted after I verify that my recovery discs are good. And after I do a clean install, the recovery discs won't be important.

I will probably do a clean install with and without RAID0 and compare - as a geek I'd prefer to have TRIM and the ability to monitor SMART on those drives.

I came so close to buying several systems with 128GB, but knew I wouldn't have enough free space for an SSD to work properly.

 

Yes, I still have the recovery partition. Should I get rid of it?
I don't really need it since my data is backed up on 2 other drives and I can easily reinstall if needed.

I can make the recovery disks just in case...

Is it possible to delete that partition and merge its space with the current one without reformatting?

PS. after checking, the recovery partition is 16GB.

 

I had this same question regarding TRIM and the Sony SA 290X that I've considered purchasing for my daughter. In talking to the Sony sales rep today, they didn't know, but offered to let me talk to Sony Tech Support.

As I was also curious about their support, never having owned a Sony laptop, I went through the prompts and in a reasonable time, was talking to a level 1 tech. She was clueless. I politely asked to talk with someone more familiar with this matter.

The Level 2 guy really didn't know, but like the first person, tried to give me canned responses that didn't even fit my questions. Why is this? Why not just say, "I don't know, but I'll find out and get back to you."?

I support commercial airplanes for a large aircraft manufacturer. I can't possibly know everything about our airplanes and the details of the Flight Management Computers etc. But I sure as heck know who to call to get to the bottom of a question, and I know better than to try and BS people...it just pisses them off.

[End Rant/]

I'm not happy with Sony's design choice of 2 x 128GB, versus just 1 x 256GB. You not only have the TRIM issue, but you have twice as much chance of disk failure with no redundancy. RAID 0 seems more suited for a gaming setup.

If Sony delivers a configuration with 1 x 128GB, can that simply be swapped out for a 1 x 256GB?

Will the single drive have TRIM support?

Or better yet, buy the smaller HDD and replace it with an SSD. I'm spooked by their BIOS and suspicious that it somehow just won't be that easy.

If anyone knows for sure, I'd appreciate the info.

Cheers

 

Don't blame only Sony. You can find what you described in many if not all of the customer services. It's almost impossible for them to say that they don't know.
I doubt any of them knows what TRIM is.

I also think 1x256 would have been more suitable. The only advantage of 2x128 should be faster access times due to parallel access to both disks.

Single drive should have TRIM support. It's up to the drive's specs. The SSDs I have do support TRIM. The only problem is the raid...

One solution is breaking the raid and having 2 SSDs without raid (probably in the BIOS...), 128 as C:\ and 128 as D:\.
That way both will use TRIM. The down side is having most of the actions on a single 128GB drive, which reduces its lifetime faster than in raid...

If I could only know if right now my system is slower due to not having TRIM or not....
If TRIM worth all this thinking at all...

 

First of all, Sony won't be the best value for money, because it's Sony.
You pay for the brand, same as with Apple. Be sure that same specs on a Dell will cost less.

Once you've decided you're willing to pay a little extra for the brand you like, you can choose a model (SA) and build your own specifications on SonyStyle's site. You don't need to pick a predefined laptop...
You can build your perfect laptop configuration easily, it's all a matter of how much you're willing to pay

 

Well if material quality(general look and feel),keyboard quality, screen quality, and all the other things you can not look up in a spec sheet is important, I find Vaio more appealing than a dell. Even though I also find it hard to configure a dell for the same price and specifications as say and VPC-SA or VPC-SB, not to mention the previous Z.


If the unmeasurable qualities = paying for the brand, I am all in for paying for the brand, it is just not a very pleasant expression.
My opinon atleast.

 

It doesn't have TRIM, but it has internal garbage collection which pretty much does the same thing.

 

No, it doesn't do the same thing at all. Garbage collection is something all SSD drives have. It concatenates partially written sectors so it can pre-erase full sectors, which helps speed. But to do that, the garbage collection needs to know which blocks really are unused. That's what TRIM does -- it tell the drive which blocks the OS doesn't use anymore, and the garbage collector can reap them.

If you don't have TRIM, the garbage collector will see more and more of the drive as being in used over time, and be able to do less and less. The only way it knows a block is free is when you tell it to write to it. And shuffling blocks around at that time is very costly and hurts performance. This is called write amplification.

Setting aside a relatively large portion of the drive for internal use allows it to remap blocks in the "spare" space for a while, until all of that space has been written to too. So that only buys you some time, it doesn't fix the problem.

Many of the popular benchmarks don't show the problem because they focus on sequential speeds, and not random writes, and even worse, they only report average speeds and not worst case speeds (it's the worst case that hurts - if the drive is near instantaneous in 99 out of 100 writes, and the 100th one takes a second, the average will be great, but you'll still feel the stutters on every 100th write).
So why are these benchmarks popular if they're so bad? Because they show high numbers. That's what people like to see. And then the users blame Firefox (or whatever else program is doing a large amount of random writes) when they get stutters. After all, their benchmarks show that everything is hunky dory!

One somewhat good benchmark that is free is part of the palimpsest disk utility in Gnome. It's available on many Linux live-CDs, including Fedora and Ubuntu. It destroys all contents and partitions on the drive, which is the only way it can truly do random writes to all sectors on the disk, and not only the free space.
I've tested hundreds of SSDs with this and other tools (as part of my job), and there's a quite dramatic drop in random write performance after a drive has been used for a while, no matter how clever the garbage collection is claimed to be. TRIM or total drive wipes are the only ways to restore the drives to full random write speeds again.

Note that read speeds are unaffected by write amplification, and sequential writes are very little affected. It's random writes, and worst cases that take a (big) hit. For many users, this is not an issue, as they don't do a lot of random writes -- they do mostly reads and large writes.