Late last week Intel launched a new Rapid Storage Technology RAID driver that brings something to Intel chipset based motherboards that has been missing and wanted for a long time.

Those consumers out there that are lucky enough to be using SSDs in RAID and ensuring that they meet the ATA-8 protocol requirements can now enable TRIM support on their arrays in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7. While we cannot confirm the reports, apparently RAID 5 isn't supported at this stage.

Keep in mind that this update isn't a firmware, but a driver that is for use with motherboards that use recent Intel controllers and southbridges. Early reports suggest that performance is up in most cases with the new driver from posts we have seen on several forums.

You can read the driver changelog that was posted over in our forums here by Lsdmeasap. You can download the new driver here, but proceed with a little caution and of course backup all your data before trying it, just to be safe.