SSD Raid on a HDD-only RAID chipset - can not use TRIM?

[CyberStrength]

Hey guys,

I recently got a GA-P55-UD for my backup PC and since I was rebuilding it and had two 120 GB SATA SSDs lying around, I decided to to run them in Raid 0, because 1) 120 GB is not a lot by itelf nowadays 2) questionable performance gains 3) they're not worth much.

It was only afterwards that I it says that the RAID BIOS only supports HDDs, but I had no problem installing and running windows. However, when I wanted to move some large files from the HDDs (also in RAID 0) I noticed that the SSDs are getting bottlenecked and the response time of the drives sometimes goes over 4-5K ms, which is absurd. Write tests were now tanking in speed compared to previously (I measured it after installing Windows). On further inspection I noticed that the drives are "fragmented" (unoptimised), but the option to optimise them is grayed out in Windows Defragment and Optimise service window.

I tried to manually optmise them with Powershell and got an error saying that the drives don't support that command. So it seems to me that because the RAID only supports HDDs, windows can not send TRIM commands to them, despite the drives appearing as SSDs in Task Manager, etc.

Before you ask, yes, I am running the RAID on the Intel chipset, not the sketchy one.

I looked across the web, but it seems no one ever has tried to do this, so there anything I can do, or do I have to rebuild the whole setup with only one SSD?

 

Spoiler

Help me, LTTF, you're my only hope..

 

[WereCatf]

16 minutes ago, CyberStrength said:

It was only afterwards that I it says that the RAID BIOS only supports HDDs

That applies to most (all?) mobo-builtin BIOS RAIDs. You should be using software RAID like e.g. Windows Storage Spaces under Windows or Btrfs/ZFS under Linux. Software RAID can make use of TRIM just fine, software RAID is also more flexible and may outperform the BIOS-one as well.

[CyberStrength]

18 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

That applies to most (all?) mobo-builtin BIOS RAIDs. You should be using software RAID like e.g. Windows Storage Spaces under Windows or Btrfs/ZFS under Linux. Software RAID can make use of TRIM just fine, software RAID is also more flexible and may outperform the BIOS-one as well.

Ugh.. I have not looked much into it, I thought software raid is "the fake raid" with "worse performance"....

[WereCatf]

25 minutes ago, CyberStrength said:

Ugh.. I have not looked much into it, I thought software raid is "the fake raid" with "worse performance"....

These days even data-centers tend to opt for software-RAID, like e.g. the aforementioned ZFS. BIOS RAID should be avoided.

[CyberStrength]

1 hour ago, WereCatf said:

These days even data-centers tend to opt for software-RAID, like e.g. the aforementioned ZFS. BIOS RAID should be avoided.

Cool. What what changed between "these days" and "before"? Should I leave the HDDs on the BIOS Raid or is that unwanted as well?
Any easy and up-to-date guide on where to start with software RAID?

[WereCatf]

Just now, CyberStrength said:

What what changed between "these days" and "before"?

Nothing much, really. BIOS RAID has always been shit. Software-RAID can make use of all the feature an OS-kernel offers, it can be fully filesystem-aware instead of just a block-based thing like BIOS RAID, it can be updated whenever needed unlike BIOS RAID, which can only be updated along the entire BIOS and so on.

4 minutes ago, CyberStrength said:

Should I leave the HDDs on the BIOS Raid or is that unwanted as well?

I would ditch the BIOS RAID, but it's up to you.

5 minutes ago, CyberStrength said:

Any easy and up-to-date guide on where to start with software RAID?

I don't use Windows Storage Spaces, so no. Should be easy enough to find plenty of guides by googling around.