E71

Thanks. That is actually good advice and a very tempting solution.

Hey folks! I'd like to kill two birds with one stone and upgrade my OS from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 (with a clean install) and "freshen" my SSDs at the same time. I have 4 x 256G Samsung 840 Pro SSDs in hardware RAID 5 (LSI 9750-8i) and it was quite fast and responsive when I first installed my OS but now it's kinda... meh... As we all know TRIM isn't supported in hardware RAID and GC isn't as efficient. Supposedly, Samsung's GC runs when system is idle and people have said for it work you need to have the system running but logged out (as oppose to just locked) but I have my system on 24/7 and only locked when away... that's a lot of degradation in performance. Anyway, I'd need to know if anyone with experience with SSDs and hardware RAID recommends any certain action to be performed prior to re-installing an OS, other than a straight-up formatting. Something to return each individual SSD to the original "new" state or as close to it as possible. Thank yoo! E71

I was using desktop grade Seagate/Hitachi drives successfully for years on a hardware RAID 6 controller. I used to get a timeout error once every couple of months, it would rebuild pretty quickly and since I'm on RAID 6 it wasn't much of a concern. Just recently switched to WD SE "enterprise grade" drives and despite having this TLER feature, right after a successful migration, I've had several timeouts from multiple drives. This whole TLER thing just feels like a bit of a placebo to me, after what I've experienced anyway. So much for "enterprise" grade.