I've got two 80GB Gen2 Intel SSDs, currently in RAID 0. I'm about to reformat for an unrelated reason, and I'm wondering if maybe I should just leave them as independent drives. The primary reason being so that I could use TRIM. I think I'd also get a faster boot, as a bonus.
As it is, they're lightning fast. The very second that I log into Windows, I get zero delay responsiveness when starting apps (the biggest delay is moving the mouse to the icon, it's pretty awesome). I'm thinking I won't really lose much, though, as I doubt that speed is dependent on the RAID.
This is my main computer (Windows 7, 3.6GHz i7 920, 6GB DDR3), so I use it for everything, but my primary uses are programming and gaming, so IO speed (particularly random read) is something I care a lot about.
So do you guys think that TRIM is worth giving up whatever speed gains I'm getting from the RAID?
Best Answer
As Phoshi mentions, there is probably little difference to random read/write performance. It's possible that with RAID0 the sequential write speed increases, because it is relatively low on the Intel X25-M drives at about 80MB/s max. However, the effect of using the drive over time, causing fragmentation, is shown here (see the table near the bottom): TRIM would help mitigate this performance drop. Also, there are the usual caveats with RAID0, such doubling the chance of data loss due to drive failure and the RAID controller itself being a single-point of failure.