In an unusually terse statement, Intel officially confirmed that the ATA TRIM command now passes through to RAID-0 SSD arrays on some systems running
Intel's RST (Rapid Storage Technology ) RAID driver version 11.0 and newer. The feature is limited to Intel 7 series chipsets with RST RAID support and currently only works on Windows 7 OSes, although Windows 8 support is forthcoming.
As soon as I got confirmation from Intel, I fired up a testbed to confirm the claim. Before I get to the results, let's have a quick recap of what all of this means.
[h=2]Why does TRIM Matter?[/h] The building block of today's SSDs that we love so much is 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND Flash. The reason that not all SSDs are created equal is because of two important factors:
1) Each NAND cell has a finite lifespan (determined by the number of program and erase cycles), and
2) Although you can write to individual NAND pages, you can only erase large groups of pages (called blocks)
These two factors go hand in hand. If you only use 10% of your drive's capacity, neither factor is much of an issue. But if you're like most users and run your drive near capacity, difficulties can arise.
