Anybody knows about a Solid State Drive Trim Support like is in Windows 7 included?
I use a Intel X25-M G2 SSD and the new Firmware supports the Trim option of Windows 7. Is there any similar in Snow Leopard?
Any experience with SSD in Mac?
MacBook Pro,
Mac OS X (10.6.1),
Intel X25-M G2 SSD
also disable spotlight and (if you not be afraid to loose data in case the macbook is sleeping and the batteries empty) set the hibernatemode to 0 (just google). Always you turn the mac to sleep, he will write the hole ram to the harddisk (4 gb in my case!) - unnecessary writing for me...
Solaris41 wrote:
Anybody knows about a Solid State Drive Trim Support like is in Windows 7 included?
I use a Intel X25-M G2 SSD and the new Firmware supports the Trim option of Windows 7. Is there any similar in Snow Leopard?
Do you really want something similar?
<http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/27/intel-pulls-ssd-toolbox-for-killing-drives-u nder-windows-7/>
As the owner of a consulting company for over 10 years, and just having made the switch over to Mac for a lot of our equipment, it's quite surprising to me that Apple does not see the value of implementing something as critical and TRIM support for SSDs as soon as possible.
Apple prides itself in having a line of laptops that are very efficient, productive, and leading edge. Leaving out TRIM support for SSDs while Windows 7 has already addressed it puts Apple, in my eyes, way behind the curve.
SSDs are gaining popularity more and more every day - Hopefully they'll act before getting too much heat.
Apple will have to improve SSD support sooner rather than later - after all, they're selling SSDs as BTO option, and they will become more important. I imagine that right now, they sell less than 1% of their machines with SSDs... maybe even less than 0.1% - only Apple knows but if the figure is very small, maybe they don't care so much about putting resources towards it.
In addition, SSD technology is a bit of a moving target. Only recently have SSDs even supported TRIM.
I'd advise against making heavy modifications to the system just to reduce writes. I need Spotlight - I use it all the time. I also need journalling and journalling information is used by TimeMachine to figure out differences (I think) so it's crucial that it's enabled. I don't think it makes sense to trade functionality for "less writes".
Apple will at some point, maybe in 1 or 2 years, have full SSD support and the system itself will have all kinds of smarts to deal with SSDs properly. Until then, I'd rather have a 50% degraded performance than missing features. A 50% SSD is still a lot faster than a HD. At least the X-25 is...
I just read that some SSDs have idle time garbage collection. That is, they wipe deleted block just like the TRIM command would whenever there's a downtime. The function is in the SSD firmware so it's OS independent.
That, to me, sounds like a much better idea than an explicit TRIM command?!
I've also read up on SSDs that support TRIM. None of the Apple BTO models do...
orthorim -- without TRIM, an SSD has no way to know if a file has been deleted. All it sees from the SATA interface is READs and WRITEs. The SSD's idle time garbage collection is for it to reorganize its own free space (this is space that is overprovisioned, e.g. a 160GB drive might actually have 200GB of NAND flash storage space - this extra space is to help it improve write performance).
The bottom line is that for optimal performance, we need Apple to implement a TRIM mechanism within the HFS filesystem.
Alternatively, an SSD vendor could provide their own low-level utility that we could run occasionally to help the drive know about blocks belonging to files that have been deleted.
I would encourage you to file feedback with Apple at either:<http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html>
or
<http://bugreporter.apple.com>
Free ADC (Apple Developer Connection) account needed for BugReporter
I keep checking in hope that the linux trim tools will someday start to work on HFS+ mac volumes, but it's not happened.
Please apple!! It can't be that hard.. implement the same interface you've already got for deleting files off a disk, and add the TRIM command to the set of directions sent to the disk.
