Intel RST 11 to bring TRIM support to RAID 0 by VR-Zone.com

It's been a very long wait, but it looks like Intel is finally ready to bring TRIM support for SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration according to details appearing on Storage Review. That said, the details posted were very slim and VR-Zone is here to fill in the gaps with some exclusive details as to what to expect from Intel's upcoming Rapid Storage technology drivers.

According to the details posted over at Storage Review the current alpha release of RST 11.5 doesn't come with support for TRIM when using RAID 0, but it mentions that it should be added in the next release of the alpha driver which should be available before the end of the year. Well, as things turn out, we'll actually see TRIM support for RAID 0 as early as in the RST 11.0 drivers, a driver that should arrive sometime in January if all goes according to plan. What's interesting here is that we'll also see support for it on the mobile chipsets that have RAID support, so we might end up with some very interesting mobile configurations in the near future.



We'll also be seeing wider Smart Response support, although this is likely to be part of Intel's 7-series chipsets rather than the current 6-series as this is Intel's first RST driver with support for the new chipsets, but sadly the information we have at hand doesn't make that entirely clear. On the subject of Smart Response, Intel has made a push to get its partners to start using Smart Response technology in more of their systems by providing an evaluation guide. We're not entirely sure about the content of this guide, but it's meant to have comparisons between various SSDs that Intel deem suitable for caching.

So what about RST 11.5 then? Well, it won't arrive until sometime in Q2 2012 and it will offer Windows 8 support as you'd expect. However, there's also some bad news here for users of older operating systems, as Intel is dropping support for Windows XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003 with the release of RST 11.5, no matter if you use the 32-bit or 64-bit version.

In related news Intel is having some problems with 4TB hard drive support and RAID 5 support in its older RST drivers and if you're planning on using either you should update to the 10.8 drivers which are currently available on Intel's website. In both cases the issues can cause data loss, so this is a highly recommended driver update to install.