So I picked up the Kingston HyperX 3K from Logan's thread ad yesterday as kind of an impulse buy. I've been doing a little bit more research and I came across something called TRIM and how it's good.
What is TRIM, really, and how can I use it to my advantage?
TRIM is a technology that helps prolong the life of SSD's. It runs in the background automatically when the SSD isn't doing much; the process is completely transparent to the user.
Is there any setup I need to do to make TRIM work?
TRIM is a patch that partly patches a big bug in Windows: its filesystem. It is not necessary on modern filesystems. Any SSD controller has native waste management and spread data allocation, the problem with Windows is that it has an extremely broken filesystem that fragments like crazy, so that any logical waste management and spread data allocation system is rendered dysfunctional. Hence TRIM, which is a Windows software that record how the Windows filesystem fragments, and recalculates the spread data allocation to compensate for that. TRIM causes slower SSD speeds and storage overhead, but keeps the SSD from some chips wearing out faster than others. TRIM is an automatic bug patch that is present in Windows NT 6.1/6.2/6.3, so you don't have to do anything to "make it work".
TRIM doesn't exist on *NIX operating systems, because they use modern filesystems with much lower overhead, much faster disk access and throughput speeds, and no fragmentation at all. For maximum performance and maintenance efficacy in *NIX-systems, SSD's are typically mounted with the parameters "noatime" (no access time, parameter for even faster data access, this also implies the nodiratime parameter) and "discard" (deleted data isn't deleted physically to save read-write cycles for extended SSD lifespan and speed, but the location of that data on the storage array is flagged at "unallocated" with the controller).
Thanks for the explanation!
Its file system lol ha hehe
Trim is specific to neither Windows nor its filesystem NTFS. It is enabled by default on Windows 7 or newer. Linux, needs "discard" added to your /etc/fstab, and trim support from the filesystem. Ext4, Btrfs, XFS work with the discard mount option. Mac OS 10.6.8 enabled trim with HFS+. If you're not buying an Apple supported SSD, have to manually enable it or use 3rd party tools. FreeBSD added UFS trim in 8.3, ZFS trimming in 9.2.
What trim actually does is tell the SSD to erase a memory block that was marked as deleted. With hard drives, the filesystem marks data as deleted, but the hard drive doesn't need delete the data on disk. The hard drive data is just overwritten where as the SSD overwriting has a lot of overhead. Fragmentation has nothing to do with trim.
But trim still doesn't work on ssd's in raid0 windows 7 right?
I only know of RAID 0 trim working on 7 (x79, etc) or newer series Intel chipsets starting with the 11.2 RST driver.