We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: AVADirect, GIGABYTE, LSI, Corsair and Noctua.

You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

As I mentioned earlier, we now have firmware in hand that has working TRIM. This is the first time Series 5 firmware with working TRIM has been out of the validation lab and we've worked really hard to get it before anyone else.

As I write this, 5.0.3 is running through its paces on an SSD that was tested just hours before with 5.0.2. We want to thank Corsair for getting this over to us first. This was literally a race; the first to get us 5.0.3 was going to be the one to make this article happen. While running through the testing cycle we received code from three other companies and those full reviews will come out over the next few days. Given the large amount of drives we have on hand, we're hoping to publish a new SSD review every day leading up to Flash Memory Summit.

The presentation format for this review will be different than what you normally see at TweakTown. The benchmarks will be presented side-by-side and in the same order we run the tests. This is important because we'll be able to show how rapidly performance degradation occurs without TRIM.

The new 5.0.3 FW isn't just a TRIM fix, new features were added, and the drives gained some performance in some areas, but went back to 3.3.4 levels in others. We would love to just go side-by-side with code that was a little closer together, but LSI SandForce isn't going to make a TweakTown Edition firmware for testing"¦ I already asked months ago.

Each benchmark will be presented side-by-side with the older 5.0.2 on the left and the new, TRIM fixed, 5.0.3 on the right. Let's go!