I've been tinkering with an EX495 I picked up from a coworker and managed to put together a BIOS that includes an Intel RAID OROM. The OROM has full SSD support including TRIM for RAID0 arrays. RAID 5 performance is dismal but 0, 1 and 10 work great.

There are some tradeoffs. I had to drop the PXE OROM, so the original recovery process for the server won't work anymore. I also had to remove all logos from the BIOS and all but one CPU microcode package, so the image has to be rebuilt for different processor series.

This same OROM can probably be added to the hacked EX487 BIOS as well, with the same drawbacks.

If anyone is interested respond in this thread with your server model and CPU information and I'll see if I can't put together an image for you.

I've attached a screenshot from Intel RST.

Does it support TRIM on RAID1 too? Interesting, but it is really still software RAID

No, Intel chipsets still can't do TRIM on a RAID1 array. The main reason I did this was for RAID10 support. It was the best way I could see to get good performance and redundancy with the hardware.

wow I would like to hear more about this bios mod. pros and cons my dad has an old ex487 gathering dust. I on the other hand have ex495 stock and a ex490