use, significantly degrading performance. On the other hand, Red Hat does recommend the use of RAID 1 or RAID 10 for LVM RAIDs on SSDs, as these levels support TRIM ("discard" in Linux terminology), and the LVM utilities do not write to all blocks when creating a RAID 1 or RAID 10 volume. Firmware-based RAID For a short time in March 2010, users were led to believe that the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6 drivers supported TRIM on RAID volumes, but Intel later clarified that TRIM was supported for the BIOS settings of AHCI mode and RAID mode, but not if the drive was part of a RAID volume. As of August 2012, Intel confirms that 7-series chipsets with Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 11.2 drivers support TRIM for RAID 0 in Microsoft Windows 7. While Intel did not confirm support for 6-series chipsets, TRIM on RAID 0 volumes has been shown to work on Z68, P67, and X79 chipsets by hardware enthusiasts with a modified RAID option ROM. It is speculated that the lack of official support for 6-series chipsets is due to validation costs or an attempt to encourage consumers to upgrade, rather than for technical reasons. An exception to the need for a modified option ROM on motherboards with an X79 chipset is if the manufacturer has added a ROM switch; this entails both the RST and RST-E ROMs being inside the BIOS/UEFI. This allows the RST ROM to be used instead of the RST-E ROM, allowing TRIM to function. Intel notes that best performance can be achieved by using a driver with same version as the ROM; for example, if the BIOS/UEFI has an 11.0.0.0m option ROM, an 11.x version driver should be used. Enabling unsupported filesystems Where the filesystem does not automatically support TRIM, some utilities can send trimming commands manually. Usually they determine which blocks are free and then pass this list as a series of trimming commands to the drive. These utilities are available from various manufacturers (e.g. Intel, G.Skill), or as general utilities (e.g. Linux's hdparm "wiper" since v9.17, or mdtrim, as mentioned above). Both hdparm and mdtrim find free blocks by allocating a large file on the filesystem and resolving what physical location it was assigned to. Regardless of operating system, the drive can detect when the computer writes all-zeros to a block, and de-allocate (trim) that block instead of recording