TRIM Now Available On RAID0 SSDs With Maximus V Motherboards

If you're using a Maximus V motherboard (or any Z77 board for that matter) along with RAID0 SSDs, you can now get TRIM support by upgrading to the 11.x (currently 11.2) Intel RST drivers. Win7 is out now, but if you're pre-testing Win8 RTM/RC1 then you'll have to wait a little longer. For Rampage IV (and other Intel X79; P9X79 & Sabertooth X79) owners, Hardware Canucks also reports a similar driver enabler is also coming soon.

Anandtech tested the latest driver in a recent article. If you're unsure what TRIM is and why you need it, Anandtech covers that too in the Why does TRIM matter? section. Here's a short clip;

Aggressive block recycling keeps performance high, at the expense of NAND endurance. Conservative block recycling preserves NAND lifespan, at the expense of performance. It's a delicate balance that a good SSD controller must achieve, and there are many tricks that can be employed to make things easier (e.g. idle time garbage collection). One way to make things easier on the controller is the use of the ATA TRIM command.

With the temptation of 1Gbps read performance without having to go for an expensive PCIe SSD, it's easy to see why strapping two SATA 6Gbps SSDs together is now an attractive option!