Intel X25-M G2 questions

[Mithan]

Hello. I am a bit of a SSD newb, even reading the Anand Tech articles on it.

I bought the Intel X25-M G2 yesterday and reformated Windows 7.

1. The question I have is, can I just assume that TRIM is working, provided I have AHCI turned on in the BIOS?

2. I also installed the Intel chipset drivers for my motherboard as well, would this screw anything up?

3. If for some reason I run without TRIM and then later get it enabled, will it optimize itself and regain lost speed and do what TRIM does, or will it sort of screw itself up?

4. Formatting the SSD is ok correct?

 

[vshah]

chipset drivers for your motherboard should be ok, but be sure that you don't have intel drivers for the storage controller. if you look in device manager it should say "standard ahci" or something, not "intel matrix storage" the intel storage driver doesn't currently support TRIM

 

[Griswold]

1. The question I have is, can I just assume that TRIM is working, provided I have AHCI turned on in the BIOS?

TRIM does not depend on AHCI. It will also work in IDE mode as it is an ATA command. However, AHCI will enable NCQ which in turn will get the most out of your SSDs random access performance.

2. I also installed the Intel chipset drivers for my motherboard as well, would this screw anything up?

As been mentioned, check in the device manager if your SATA controller uses the driver iastor.sys. That is the intel driver which currently does not pass the TRIM command to the SSD.

3. If for some reason I run without TRIM and then later get it enabled, will it optimize itself and regain lost speed and do what TRIM does, or will it sort of screw itself up?

TRIM tells the controller in the SSD which files have been deleted so it knows which cells can be erased. If you run without TRIM for some time and enable it later, it will not tell the SSD controller about the status of deleted files prior to enabling TRIM. I think the best way to sort the situation out quickly (it will eventually do so by itself as you write data to your SSD and delete it again), is to fill that drive (with TRIM enabled) with some large files and then delete them again - from that point on, the free space will be "TRIMed".

4. Formatting the SSD is ok correct?

Of course, otherwise you cant use it.

 

[Mithan]

Thanks guys, I love you!