Does TRIM work on H97 chipset RAID 0??

Jembo

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Jun 18, 2014
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I have 2 older 128 GB SSD's(different brands). I want to set them up in a RAID 0 array on an Intel H97 board. Can I just put the board in AHCI, turn RAID on in UEFI, install Windows 8.1 then install the Intel RST drivers? Will TRIM work after all of that?

I don't care for redundancy. Thanks.:eek:
 

Coup27

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Jul 17, 2010
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When using RAID arrays the drives need to be identical models or as close to this as possible. If you have two different branded SSD's then they will be reading and writing data at different speeds and then your RAID0 array is likely to fall over.
 

Jembo

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Great advice. Is there any way to span the disks into one before installing Windows 8.1 so Windows thinks it's 1 256 GB drive instead of 2 128 Gb?
 

Coup27

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I'm not an expert on dynamic disks but if you install Windows onto one SSD then connect the other and go into disk management and convert both disks to dynamic disks you I think you can then create a spanned volume which will cover both disks. I don't think there is anything in Intel RST Option ROM to do it before you install Windows.

Although I honestly don't see the point. There will be no performance increase, you'll possibly lose TRIM support and the ability to access the data on another computer and if you get a serious error on the system which affects booting it'll likely be harder to rescue. SSD toolbox programs may also not be able to connect to the disk which may effect diagnostics / fw updates / manual TRIM. You could avoid all of this by just having 2 separate disks and managing the space yourself.

FWIW, SSD's in RAID-0 only yield a big performance increase on sequential reads and writes. Many people including myself have tried it and not noticed any performance increase because we don't run the specific workload which takes advantage of it. 4k read which is most responsible for the overall "snappy" feel of your system is not improved with RAID-0.
 
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Anteaus

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Oct 28, 2010
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/6161/...ssd-arrays-on-7series-motherboards-we-test-it

I think you are good to go. Works great on my X99. As others have said, there is no point to do it for performance reasons; however, if you just want to pool your two 128GB drives in one 256GB drive for usability purposes...go ahead and do it. As long as you acknowledge the risk to your data of running Raid 0 there are no other downsides. I'd suggest you apply over-provision.
 

Jembo

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Jun 18, 2014
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Awesome. Thanks both. Anteaus, yeah I want it for the space. This PC is offline so I have Wikipedia installed on it but that is like 70 GB alone. I'll give it a shot.
As for Dynamic Disks, I don't think you can convert a Boot Disk to Dynamic.