There are plenty of resources available online that discuss using SSD drives in RAID configurations - however these mostly date back a few years, and the SSD ecosystem is very fast-moving - right as we're expecting Intel's "Optane" product release later this year which will change everything... again.
I'll preface my question by affirming there is a qualitative difference between consumer-grade SSDs (e.g. Intel 535) and datacenter-grade SSDs (e.g. Intel DC S3700).
My primary concern relates to TRIM
support in RAID scenarios. To my understanding, despite it being over 6 years since SSDs were introduced in consumer-grade computers and 4 years since NVMe was commercially available - modern-day RAID controllers still do not support issuing TRIM
commands to attached SSDs - with the exception of Intel's RAID controllers in RAID-0 mode.
I'm surprised that TRIM
support is not present in RAID-1 mode, given the way drives mirror each other, it seems straightforward. But I digress.
I note that if you want fault-tolerance with disks (both HDD and SSD), you would use them in a RAID configuration - but as the SSDs would be without TRIM it means they would suffer Write-Amplification which results in extra wear, which in turn would cause SSDs to fail prematurely - this is an unfortunate irony: a system designed to protect against drive failure might end-up directly resulting in it.
So:
- Is
TRIM
support necessary for modern (2015-2016 era) SSDs?- Is there any difference in the need for
TRIM
support between SATA, SATA-Express, and NVMe-based SSDs?
- Is there any difference in the need for
- Often drives are advertised as having improved built-in garbage-collection; does that obviate the need for
TRIM
? How does their GC process work in RAID environments?- For example, see this QA from 2010 which describes pretty-bad performance degradation due to not-TRIMming - and this article from 2015 makes the case that using TRIM is strongly recommended.
What is your response to these strong arguments for the necessity ofTRIM
?
- For example, see this QA from 2010 which describes pretty-bad performance degradation due to not-TRIMming - and this article from 2015 makes the case that using TRIM is strongly recommended.
- A lot of articles and discussion from earlier years concerns SLC vs MLC flash and that SLC is preferable, due to its much longer lifespan - however it seems all SSDs today (regardless of where they sit on the Consumer-to-Enterprise spectrum) are MLC thesedays - is this distinction of relevance anymore?
- And what about TLC flash?
- Enterprise SSDs tend to have have much higher endurance / write-limits (often measured in how many times you can completely overwrite the drive in a day, throughout a drive's expected 5 year lifespan) - if their write-cycle limit is very high (e.g. 100 complete writes per day) does this mean that they don't need
TRIM
at all because those limits are so high, or - the opposite - are those limits only attainable by usingTRIM
?