I'm not going to delude myself by truly believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that this will happen, but I have a feeling this is what will happen with the intel x25-m g1.
We all know the G2s will support TRIM, and currently according to anand's new SSD article they do some amazing garbage collection that keeps 4k r/w at super-high speeds and that this means they are clearly a much better choice than a G1 in almost all regards. I also personally just bought a G1 knowing I wasn't satisified with my 60G vertex that I had originally bought and I could get a new G1 for less than the $200 vertex anyway.
So I got to thinking, as much as it might seem impossible since intel said the G1s will never support trim, well I've been reading rumors lately that they are probably going to release a forced performance enhancing tool much like the vertex wiper.exe for older versions of windows for the new G2. This isn't technically TRIM support since it must be run manually and isn't passed in the background by the OS, so maybe in order to both drum up sales of their new G2 since the TRIM support is likely months away and to actually come up with a way to support the early G1 adopters and not seem like total a-holes, they might make this wiper.exe equivalent support G1s as well as G2s.
Of course, you could say they have no real monetary reason to do this and they DID just get done saying the G1 would not be getting TRIM support, but then again the indilinx wiper utility has been out for a while now and yet nobody has actually stated that the drives had TRIM support despite the fact that you could argue the wiper.exe suffices to give TRIM support to the drive. Also, the reason they could offer the g2 x25-m at such a competitive price is because of the 34nm flash, they obviously will either stop selling the g1 entirely or continue to sell it to retailers at a higher price which still gives the G2 inherent advantages across the board compared to the G1.
Another point to mention is that if the wiper.exe does get released in the future, there could be some effort by elusive hackers to make the tool work with the G1 as well since the data passed to the controller could effectively boil down to a list of LBAs to garbage collect that could possibly be easily reverse engineered to support a G1 (like the indilinx wiper utility does as is) although the cost could possibly be a few bricked G1s to some hacker savior.
Long story short, I'm sure we all at least agree there's no good reason the G1s shouldn't receive TRIM support at some point. Intel has no business advantage in offering new features to outdated tech which is (unfortunately) understandable, but if they plan to put forth the effort into producing a 300kb exe file that simulates TRIM support for G2s, for all we know they could end up not having "lied" about TRIM support never coming to G1s by quietly adding G1 support to the wiper.exe and they'll have basically wiped away 1 of the only two sore spots in their SSD reputation (the other being an arbitrary 70 mb/s write limit). Either that or they don't officially support wiper.exe on G1s but all that's needed to be done is hexedit a value in the exe that checks for drive firmware codes.
Call me an optimist, but the more I think about this, the more it seems to have possibly been the plan all along: get the G2s in stock at MSRP all over the net, stop producing the G1 and then happen to have G1 support in an XP/vista wiper.exe and gain everyone's good graces who felt left behind with a gimped G1. All I know is in the meantime I'll be feeling great having a drive that while unfortunately getting worse performance over time is still more than twice as fast at 4k randoms and 15GB larger than the competition.
What do y'all think?
We all know the G2s will support TRIM, and currently according to anand's new SSD article they do some amazing garbage collection that keeps 4k r/w at super-high speeds and that this means they are clearly a much better choice than a G1 in almost all regards. I also personally just bought a G1 knowing I wasn't satisified with my 60G vertex that I had originally bought and I could get a new G1 for less than the $200 vertex anyway.
So I got to thinking, as much as it might seem impossible since intel said the G1s will never support trim, well I've been reading rumors lately that they are probably going to release a forced performance enhancing tool much like the vertex wiper.exe for older versions of windows for the new G2. This isn't technically TRIM support since it must be run manually and isn't passed in the background by the OS, so maybe in order to both drum up sales of their new G2 since the TRIM support is likely months away and to actually come up with a way to support the early G1 adopters and not seem like total a-holes, they might make this wiper.exe equivalent support G1s as well as G2s.
Of course, you could say they have no real monetary reason to do this and they DID just get done saying the G1 would not be getting TRIM support, but then again the indilinx wiper utility has been out for a while now and yet nobody has actually stated that the drives had TRIM support despite the fact that you could argue the wiper.exe suffices to give TRIM support to the drive. Also, the reason they could offer the g2 x25-m at such a competitive price is because of the 34nm flash, they obviously will either stop selling the g1 entirely or continue to sell it to retailers at a higher price which still gives the G2 inherent advantages across the board compared to the G1.
Another point to mention is that if the wiper.exe does get released in the future, there could be some effort by elusive hackers to make the tool work with the G1 as well since the data passed to the controller could effectively boil down to a list of LBAs to garbage collect that could possibly be easily reverse engineered to support a G1 (like the indilinx wiper utility does as is) although the cost could possibly be a few bricked G1s to some hacker savior.
Long story short, I'm sure we all at least agree there's no good reason the G1s shouldn't receive TRIM support at some point. Intel has no business advantage in offering new features to outdated tech which is (unfortunately) understandable, but if they plan to put forth the effort into producing a 300kb exe file that simulates TRIM support for G2s, for all we know they could end up not having "lied" about TRIM support never coming to G1s by quietly adding G1 support to the wiper.exe and they'll have basically wiped away 1 of the only two sore spots in their SSD reputation (the other being an arbitrary 70 mb/s write limit). Either that or they don't officially support wiper.exe on G1s but all that's needed to be done is hexedit a value in the exe that checks for drive firmware codes.
Call me an optimist, but the more I think about this, the more it seems to have possibly been the plan all along: get the G2s in stock at MSRP all over the net, stop producing the G1 and then happen to have G1 support in an XP/vista wiper.exe and gain everyone's good graces who felt left behind with a gimped G1. All I know is in the meantime I'll be feeling great having a drive that while unfortunately getting worse performance over time is still more than twice as fast at 4k randoms and 15GB larger than the competition.
What do y'all think?
