Current State of Drivers and Trim on SSD's in Thinkpads

[Harryc]

As the topic states, what is the current state of drivers and trim support on SSD's in Thinkpads? For example, do we still need to run the MS AHCI drivers for trim support? Intel has released drivers (9.6 RST) that support trim on AHCI SSD's. Will these work on a Thinkpad? I run the Intel(R) 5 Series 6 Port SATA AHCI Controller driver (9.5.7.1002) on my T410. Do I also need to run the Intel toolbox? Rumors are going around the web lately that the Intel toolbox is killing SSD's? Any truth to that?

[Wiz]

For trim support you need the MS AHCI driver or the RST driver that can be downloaded from Intel. There is also a RST driver available from Lenovo. Both works fine on the T410 and many other TP's. I'm not sure if the 9.5 driver from Lenovo support trim, but either way i would rather pick the newer driver from Intel. Lenovo don't create these driver or have them made especially for the TP's so basically it's the same driver with new wrapping, but Lenovo is often pretty slow to release new drivers. The same goes for the Lenovo WiFi drivers.

Does RST support trim:
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/i ... 031491.htm
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/i ... 022304.htm

If using the older Matrix Storage Manager driver from Intel you need to run trim manually by using the Intel SSD Toolbox (for Intel SSD's), but the Intel SSD toolbox should not be needed for Trim support with RST 9.6 or MS AHCI. The Intel SSD can provide you with some other info like the firmware version and so on, but except from that the Intel SSD toolbox should be useless if you got a driver with trim support. Like i said i'm not sure about the trim support using RST 9.5, but why use the older driver anyway. I got a lot of thinkpads running the RST driver 9.6 from Intel and no problems so far. Tried the 9.5 driver that worked fine as well, but all TPs been upgraded to RST 9.6 so don't use 9.5 on any TP anymore.

I had several thinkpads running the older Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver with Intel SSD toolbox, but didn't kill any of the SSD's. So not sure if there is any truth in the rumor or not, but i never heard or experienced that the toolbox might kill the SSD. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not true tho.

[Harryc]

Thanks for the reply. I downloaded and installed the Intel RST 9.6 driver and it seems to be working well. I checked the Lenovo RST driver, and I already had the latest version installed prior to this ...9.5.7.1002. My understanding is that trim support started with the 9.6 drivers.

[Wiz]

Thanks for the reply. I downloaded and installed the Intel RST 9.6 driver and it seems to be working well. I checked the Lenovo RST driver, and I already had the latest version installed prior to this ...9.5.7.1002. My understanding is that trim support started with the 9.6 drivers.

Yeah i guess you are right because i couldn't find any info that says RST support trim until 9.6. At first i thought the trim support started with the first release of RST, but seems like you said that RST 9.6 is the first version that support trim.

Did you ever run any benchmark using the MS AHCI driver so you can run the benchmark again to compare?

[Harryc]

Did you ever run any benchmark using the MS AHCI driver so you can run the benchmark again to compare?

I did install HDTune Pro latest version and tested before and after. Unfortunately I could only do read tests because writes require a blank partition. So, for what its worth;

Lenovo RST Driver 9.5.7.1002 -

Read Min - 105.2MB/s
Read Max - 170.4 MB/s
Read Avg 160.6 MB/s Avg
Access Time - .2ms
Burst - 97.3 MB/s
CPU - -1.0%

Intel RST 9.6 -

Read Min - 112.4 MB/s
Read Max - 188.2 MB/s
Read Avg 175.5 MB/s Avg
Access Time - .1ms
Burst - 105 MB/s
CPU - -1.0%

[Wiz]

Thanks, seems like the new driver is a bit faster compared to 9.5.

I tried running CrystalDiskMark 3.0 B5 x64 some weeks ago and got the results below on a W500. It doesn't require a blank partition to test write.

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/sec [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 bytes/sec]

Sequential Read : 259.549 MB/s
Sequential Write : 109.581 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 192.862 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 111.421 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 17.565 MB/s [ 4288.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 35.640 MB/s [ 8701.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 159.446 MB/s [ 38927.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 96.876 MB/s [ 23651.3 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 37.0% (55.1/148.9 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/03/31 1:03:02
OS : Windows 7 Enterprise Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)