RollBack RX on SSD

[WilliamP]

Is there any problem with using RollBack RX on an SSD.

[Owl]

The short answer is "yes", but the clever people will be along shortly...

There's all sorts of stuff about the way SSDs use wear-levelling - they spread the writes across the whole drive instead of re-writing to the same sector all the time because there is a limited lifetime in terms of write cycles on each bit. But that's what RollbackRX does to preserve past drive states - the next write to the sector gets diverted to a previously unused sector. That's OK, but then the SSD has to do a garbage-collection cycle... I don't know the ins and outs.

You could read this: Still issues with SSD?

and this: SSD and Trim - a new era?

[Froggie]

Greetings, WilliamP! According to HorizpnDataSys, the current release dated 18Jul (which was really stealthily updated on or about 08Aug) is supposed to now support SSDs with active TRIM through Windows 7.

I have yet to do any serious testing in this area (will start soon now that I have an SSD to play with).

If you play, keep us posted...

[nexstar]

Hi WilliamP. As Owl has said, yes, initially there were issues because of the Trim command now common on most SSD's.

I've got 2 devices with SSD but they are both now happily using RollBack. One is a Dell Mini 9 netbook which doesn't support the Trim command anyway and so is quite safe in any event. The other is a Dell XPS M1530 which has a 120GB OCZ Vertex II SSD and the Trim command on that used to have to be disabled using a command line instruction (disabledeletenotify 1).

I forgot to do this once after re-installing RB and a few days later I discovered that my snapshots had suddenly vanished .

As Froggie says, the latest version of RB is supposed to play nicely with SSD and the Trim function. I have been using this on the M1530 for a couple of months now with Trim enabled and with no issues whatever .

Graham

[aladdin™]

Hi WilliamP,

Basically, the latest version of Rollback Rx emulates software RAID on SSD, thus disabling the TRIM function.

See here:

RAID and SSD and Rollback Rx.

Best regards,

aladdin® (aka KOR!)

[WilliamP]

It doesn't look as though Horizon cares to answer the SSD question. There is a lot of people buying SSD's and if they want to sell software they should get on this forum and either confirm or deny the support for SSD's.

[nexstar]

Hi WilliamP,

I think that they have officially confirmed their support for SSD here. What we have yet to discover is in what way the Trim command is 'supported'.

They may have disabled it by making the system look like a RAID system which seems to be the case with aladdin's SSD. But we haven't been able to establish if other makes of SSD also show up as RAID.

I've been using OCZ Vertex2 SSD for the last year with RB by manually turning off Trim.

Graham

[WilliamP]

Thank you Nexstar for your reply. But isn't turning off Trim, not a good idea?

[nexstar]

Well, from what I've read, it is obviously better if Trim can operate to clean up the SSD. I may be losing performance as a result of this but as my poor performance SSD is like night and day in comparison with my non-SSD drives then this isn't a problem to me.

When I have RB uninstalled then I re-enable Trim which presumably gets me back to a 'clean' drive.

I know that it would be great if HDS had found a way to leave Trim enabled with RB installed but, having some idea of how RB works, I can't see that being possible without some fundamental changes. Maybe they have done this, we don't know yet.

For me, given the choice between Trim and RB then RB wins. If your priorities differ then you may just have to do without RB.

Graham

[WilliamP]

I have two home built computers with Win.XP , First Defense ISR and a laptop with Win.7 and RollbackRX. The two with XP have SSD's Intels and everything works great. I am planning a new computer with 7 and an SSD. That is why I am concerned about the trim and SSD support.