Hello there!
Is there any way to tell windows that a drive is an SSD rather than an HDD ? I know it should be automatic, but in some cases it's not, let me explain. I'm the kind of guy who likes to recycle my old laptop's drives when my laptops dies, be it HDDs or mSATA SSDs so I can extend my storage with no cost and I only put data I don't care loosing so in case one of them go boom, it's not the end of the world. So I even have 10+ years old drives that are running fine (for now) to store some of my data. So, for HDDs it's really straight forward, I plug them to the SATA ports and it's all fine, for the mSATA SSDs it's a bit different.
I've been using a raid enclosure like this one for over 3 years now, so I can put my two 250Gb mSATA SSDs in RAID0 and I plug them to the SATA port too. I bought it many years ago on Aliexpress so it's a chinese (probably rebranded) JMicron JMS562 mSATA to SATA raid controller card. It's working fine, but early on when I first install them, I realized Windows recognized it as an RAID0 HDD and not a RAID0 SSD. So to avoid putting to much pressure on it, I deactivated all HDD optimizations / defrag, because I know it's not good for SSDs, but I can't use SSD optimizations and I don't know if Windows is using it at its full potential because it sees it as an HDD. It's working fine since then, for the information, the 2 mSATA are Samsung 840 EVO mSATA and 860 EVO mSATA, both 250GB versions. The reads and writes are what to be expected, I tested them with CrystalDiskMark, but CrystalDiskInfo don't even see them.
So should I care about the situation or is everything fine here ? I recently downloaded the "official" Raid Manager app for the enclosure to see if I missed any drivers or someting I did wrong. It sees my RAID, even recognized my 2 mSATA SDD but there is no drivers to install, no options or anything. I can just format them to create new RAID0, RAID1 or a large drive. Maybe I'll try to do the RAID via the app rather than using Windows disk manager.
Thanks for your help!
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Yeah I know xD As I said, it just a dummy drive, because I didn't want to let them collect dust on my dead laptop, so it's just game installs. And I've been using them like that for 3 years. I was just wondering about the tech behind it, more than trying to "save them". And for the interface, it's actually the same speed as what I had on my laptop back in the days, it's 2013-2014-ish drives, so I'm not loosing much about speed.
But my concern is more about the durability. They have been running for 7 years (at least the 840) on my laptop as my primary drive. So Windows wrote/deleted a lot of stuff and now for 3 years on the RAID controller, so without any optimizations nor TRIM whatsoever, but as a side drive only for some games, that's all.