Intel SSD Toolbox Question

[WilliamP]

I have two computers with Win.XP and Intel SSDs. I use the Intel Toolbox to clean them. Question #1 is, will the Intel Toolbox work on any other brands? Question #2 does any other SSD manufacturer have their own toolbox? And question #3 is can you use the Toolbox with Windows 7?

 

[dfuze]

I am not sure about the first 2, but have used the toolbox on my W7 machine.

 

[razel]

I assume your questions are specific to it's optimize feature, which is the portion that 'manually TRIMs' SSDs. Intel's Toolbox will not optimize other SSD brands. Samsung has a Toolbox. You can use the Toolbox's 'manual TRIM' in Win7 but it's unnecessary.

Sounds like you are pretty careful which is good. Please do not do the OCZ Tony TRIM or secure erase on a whim. Both will just unnecessarily wear your drive faster than any other thing you can do aside from loading up on massive HD p0rn.

 

[Coup27]

Pretty much what Razel said.

The toolbox will allow you to view drive information or SMART data but outside of an Intel SSD, thats all it will allow you to do.

The Samsung SSD Magician is quite a polished piece of software with a manual TRIM function along with other features. OCZ has a toolbox but its rather wishy washy and doesn't do a lot. Does not have a TRIM feature.

The toolbox works fine on Windows 7. If you use the default msahci driver or a modern Intel RST driver than TRIM should be native and you should not need the toolbox for TRIM. However, I use W7 with the latest RST and I find that optimization takes longer if I haven't done it for a while, which would suggest to me that TRIM isn't automatically taking place.

Either way, I read the Intel user guide for the SSD toolbox and it said that using the optimization tool would not wear the SSD in anyway.