So I just bought an OCZ Vertex 2 (120GB).

[francisw19]

Congrats on the new SSD! The Vertex2's are great! Too bad about the DOA...best of luck with getting in replaced.

[Mr. Gruntsworthy]

All right, got my replacement, I'm back in action!

I'm running Windows Vista; for the Vertex 2, what's the closest thing to TRIM I can get my hands on?

[francisw19]

With the Vertex2, it supports "garbage collection", so you don't have to worry if you don't have TRIM. GC is built into the firmware of the drive and independant of the OS/file system/RAID config.

AFAIK, all you have to do is just let the disk sit idle (usually sitting at the log in screen is fine) and GC will kick in automatically.

[Mr. Gruntsworthy]

If they make these things much faster, you're going to be fully logged back in... before you shut it down!

[JD]

I believe Sandforce drives rely more on TRIM than ITGC. It has some ITGC though but not as prominent as some of the other drives/controllers.

As such, I think upgrading to Windows 7 would be a worthwhile investment as well. Vista support is basically unheard of these days IMO. Everybody got off that sinking ship FAST or didn't even get on it.

[draemn]

Yep, most important point is that the garbage collection is IDLE! So, it will perform this routine when the drive is idle... it won't make much of a difference, but it is an interesting fact that idle garbage collection will pretty much tidy up free space as soon as possible, where (sandforce) TRIM will wait until the space (block) is full and then activate. The IGC is a bit more write intensive, but offers better performance. According to Anand, you don't have to worry about using up 10k write cycles without having special circumstances.

Although Vista is not perfect and windows 7 has some great improvements, I don't think vista is as horrible as most people say. It is a bit buggier than windows 7, but still works fine.

[AkG]

Um not exactly.

The SF drives do what is called lazy house cleaning and its FAR from instant with both TRIM and ITGC. The longer you can let it idle...the better. Then again the way SF drives are designed to work...I doubt you will notice a degraded state until its REALLY dirty.

With that being said...you really, really, really want to upgrade from Windows Turtle Edition. Vista simply blows and IMHO anyone who paid money for Vista should have gotten Vista 2.0 (aka win 7) for FREE, as it is everything Vista SHOULD have been, and thus doenst suck.

Also the NAND in SSDs is no longer 10k. Its at best 5K and at worst 3K. Burning nand life is not a good thing and not worth the dif in performance (even putting aside lazy house cleaning) UNLESS you are talking about 3+ in a raid array. Hell with the new 25nm NAND (on the 8GB chips)...the page size is now 8KB AND the Block size has also gone from 128 pages to 256 pages...which means a block erase will take up 4 times the number of cells (potentially)...now throw in the extra overhead in cell burning that "ITGC" brings to the encounter and 3K life cycle is not that long anymore.

[Mr. Gruntsworthy]

As long as I leave a nice buffer of space (hence the 120GB variant), and with the optimizations from the online guide, I think I should be good. Admittedly, after doing a read test, the drive maxed out at 180mb/s (yes, I'm in ACHI mode), but it's still over twice the performance of my old hard drive.

also, my computer stays on 24/7 so the drive'll have plenty of time for background garbage collection.

[AkG]

If you want to give it as best a chance as possible of never NOTICEABLY slowing down...make the partition 100GB in size instead of 120GB. That will basically give the drive even more over-provisioning....and help it rebound faster (basically'ish you will be turning your "extended" 120 in the "original" 100 model..which is what I do with em 9 times out of 10).

[Mr. Gruntsworthy]

Mine's not extended. Just the basic OCZ Vertex 2.