Intel SSD Toolbox – Importance for TRIM Functionality

I currently run VM Workstation 8 on a set of 3 OCZ Vertex 3 240 Max IOP SSDs in a RAID 0 set. Performance is great. Since there is no TRIM in RAID I just leave about 100Gb unused so that garbage collection can still take place. Lack of TRIM has never been a factor and I'm running about 8 servers including an iSCSI server. With iSCSI I just serve up disk images and the performance is super. Clustering is very doable, even on a good laptop. Running VMware ESXi is also very doable. SSD makes it happen.

For keeping "sensitive information" you should consider the time to be "Never". Not only do you have TRIM to be concerned about, but if a cell is swapped out for "wearing out" that the data in that cell can never be erased as worn out cells in SSD drives do not loose their data but become read-only.

If you have sensitive information it must stored inside a encrypted container and a unencrypted version must never reside on the hard drive. Due to how modern software and operating systems work, quite often using temporary files that could contain a copy of the data you are working with, the only safe way to do this is do full drive encryption on the drive so there is no space for temporary files to be stored that is not encryptied.

(P.S. If the sensitive data was already on the drive unencrypted but then you encrypt the drive with full drive encryption you still must treat the drive as if it had unencrypted text on it. This is because some of the sensitive information could be sitting in one of those read-only worn out sectors and enabling full drive encryption can't overwrite those read-only cells. The only "safe" way to do it is encrypt a drive that has no sensitive information on it then start using it to store sensitive information only after full drive encryption has been performed.)