Non-TRIM Environment Testing
Many controllers can be severely handicapped in an environment that doesn’t support TRIM. To re-create this, we first modified our test-bed so that it would not pass the necessary cleaning commands to the drive. Meanwhile, to artificially induce a degraded state, we run eight hours of Iometer (100% random, 100% write, 4K chunks of data, QD=64) across the entire array’s capacity. At the end of this test, the Iometer file is deleted and the drive is then tested. This method, the results of which are indicated below as “Dirty,” will replicate drive performance after extended heavy writing before any self-maintenance routines kick in.
In order to activate each drive’s garbage collection routines, we then let the system idle for 30 minutes and rerun the tests.
For a real world application we have opted for our standard Vista load time test.
These numbers are respectable, but it seems that reducing the RAM capacity does have a noticeable impact on overall degraded-state performance. It is unfortunate that OCZ still has not addressed this long term issue with a “wiper.exe” type program. While the results are adequate, this drive would not be our first choice for non-TRIM environments.
Non-TRIM Environment Testing
Many controllers can be severely handicapped in an environment that doesn’t support TRIM. To re-create this, we first modified our test-bed so that it would not pass the necessary cleaning commands to the drive. Meanwhile, to artificially induce a degraded state, we run eight hours of Iometer (100% random, 100% write, 4K chunks of data, QD=64) across the entire array’s capacity. At the end of this test, the Iometer file is deleted and the drive is then tested. This method, the results of which are indicated below as “Dirty,” will replicate drive performance after extended heavy writing before any self-maintenance routines kick in.
In order to activate each drive’s garbage collection routines, we then let the system idle for 30 minutes and rerun the tests.
For a real world application we have opted for our standard Vista load time test.

These numbers are respectable, but it seems that reducing the RAM capacity does have a noticeable impact on overall degraded-state performance. It is unfortunate that OCZ still has not addressed this long term issue with a “wiper.exe” type program. While the results are adequate, this drive would not be our first choice for non-TRIM environments.