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SSD RAID/Striped Arrays and the Windows TRIM Function

magneto

magneto

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Hi All,

Happy Black Friday! Hope you had a good one.

I created a BIOS configured RAID array out of a couple of identical old SATA SSDs, Samsung EVO 850s. Worked great - but I was unable to Optimize or TRIM the volume.
So I tried creating a Striped Volume out of them in Windows and had the same problem.
It was "not possible" in the Windows Optimise Drives app. So I tried Windows Powershell command:

PS C:\>Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter H -ReTrim -Verbose

And this failed with an error.

Are you running SSD RAID/Striped arrays in Windows 10? How do you manage Optimising the Volume?
 
Alex Glawion

Alex Glawion

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What Motherboard chipset are you running this on? Last I heard some chipsets like x570 do not support TRIM.

 
magneto

magneto

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Thanks Alex,

Ah well that has to be the answer! Yes it is an X570 Board. Too bad, the Controllers in the SSDs will provide Garbage Collection by themselves but my understanding is that without TRIM, the drives will suffer lower endurance. To be clear, the TRIM function works perfectly well under X570 for SSDs if they are configured normally (not in RAID).
I looked around and others report that SSD RAID Arrays under X570 and B550 Chipsets provide terrible write performance anyway.

So I have combined the Drives as a Simple Pool with Storage Spaces, this gives no performance boost but saves on drive letters. Here I will store only very static data (Sample Libraries) and back it up.

Thanks for clearing up my conundrum.
 
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