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SSD drives - do they need Sector-by-Sector backup

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I have 2 - OCZ Vertex 48GB SSD drives in RAID0 format. I am using Vista Home Premium 32 bit. My OS resides on the 2 SSD drives (C partitition) and on a SATA HDD. (D partitition). *** Should I be using Sector-by-Sector backup? *** Although I do not have Sector-by-sector checked, I notice that when I do a recovery, the recovery process says 'recovering sector-by-sector'.
So far my back ups and recovery have worked as is.

I am having some problems with my current recovery but I do not know what the issue is. I am doing 'garbage collection' (this cleans up deleted files on the SSD drives) before trying my restore again, but I would think that if the Restore is Sector-by-sector then 'garbage collection' would not be needed

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Hi there,

You do not need to do a sector-by-sector backup. Acronis is not aware of how the controller manages the physical sectors/pages in the memory, so the TRIM process (which syncs with the OS free logical logical information to "prep" the free space in the physical sectors for later writing) is independent of what Acronis does. So let the TRIM function operate at idle time from time to time overnight.
Before you restore, you could secure erase your disks, probably after breaking the RAID, and before rebuilding it. You could do this every 6 to 12 months depending how heavily you use your SSD.

ATI defaults back to sector by sector recovery under certain circumstances (ie bad block, resizing apparently). I saw it happen on my SSD recoveries, and I am not sure what exactly triggers it.

Thank you very clear answer - isn't SSD in RAID0 format and SATA sweet !!
Now to try to make Vista SP2 work as it is supposed to.

SSD in any RAID isn't sweet at all
because AFAIK there is no RAID controller / driver that works with TRIM
The only way to combine multiple SSDs with TRIM is to split off functions to drives:
Volume 1 : data
Volume 2 : logs
Volume 3: pagefile
Volume 4: you get the idea

Pat L wrote:

ATI defaults back to sector by sector recovery under certain circumstances (ie bad block, resizing apparently). I saw it happen on my SSD recoveries, and I am not sure what exactly triggers it.

TI will use sector-by-sector restore when possible. This means that most "normal" restores are sector-by-sector. As far as I know, this was done to help avoid problems when things didn't end up back at the same sectors. When TI determines that the destination is the same as the source, sector-by-sector is used and everything should end up back where it was when imaged.

I must be confusing different things, then. Clearly in some case the restore is taking much more time than others, and I'd say ATI displays a message about some sector by sector operation.

A sector-by-sector restore doesn't take any more time than a non-sector-by-sector restore (assuming the backup was NOT sector-by-sector). The same number of sectors (the same amount of data) is being restored. The only difference is the placement. Sector 52337 may be restored to 52337 or 42371, for example.

My understanding is that it allows System Restore to still function after a restore (because everything is where it should be) and you could also continue with Incremental backups and retain Incremental image sizes. The older versions of TI didn't have this capability and caused a lot of complaints.

Extra time could be because of other things. Resizing should use normal mode since the partition isn't the same. Bad blocks can cause problems both ways, along with not being able to resize.