Still playing with my new system, and really loving the new SSD. However in the back of my mind I was a little worried about the dreaded performance drop off of SSD’s after writing data to them for extended periods of time. So when shopping I made sure I bought a drive that was going to support the new TRIM command supported by Windows 7. Anandtech.com explains what TRIM is much better than I can, so I will leave that there.

WARNING: Backup all data before flashing your drive, or trying anything even remotely like this

However, the Crucial drive I have (CT128M225), like all the other SSD’s out there, require the drives controller to be flashed to support the new TRIM command. So I downloaded the iso and booted into the flash utility, but no drive showed up!

So it seems there is a little hiccup with the flash utility from Crucial, it does not have RAID drivers for the Intel P55 Express chipset on my motherboard. So I had to do a little trickery, basically you simply boot into the BIOS configuration and change your drive settings from RAID to IDE. This basically disables the RAID functionality and makes all your hard drives look like IDE drives.

IMPORTANT: do not let Windows boot with this setting changed, Windows will figure you removed the RAID, mess with drivers, re-assign driver letters and who knows what else.

After turning off RAID I rebooted using the Flash CD, flashed my Crucial drive, removed the CD and rebooted back into the BIOS. After changing back to RAID the system booted as normal all the RAID volumes were found again (I have my Crucial drive as the main, and two 750GB Seagate drives in RAID 1 for protected data drives).

Windows 7 required a restart again, I assume it updated drivers for TRIM? and now everything is running great.

You will not see a performance increase, but this will help keep your system fast while you use it in the future, and the firmware had some other bug fixes and features.