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_bnkr612

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 8, 2004
619
0
Hey Folks,

Installed an OWC SSD on my Mac Mini (which is great!), and thought I would need to run Trim Enabler. This is a bad idea, OWC's SandForce controllers do all the work. OWC's SandForce controllers do all the work.

DO NOT INSTALL TRIM ENABLER. I noticed horrible freezes/pauses (beach ball) in day-to-day tasks. After turning it off again, my machine was back to being a great little Mac Mini Pro (16gb, 2.3 i7).
 

kissmo

Cancelled
Jun 29, 2011
1,062
1,055
Budapest, Hungary
Hey Folks,

Installed an OWC SSD on my Mac Mini (which is great!), and thought I would need to run Trim Enabler. This is a bad idea, OWC's SandForce controllers do all the work. OWC's SandForce controllers do all the work.

DO NOT INSTALL TRIM ENABLER. I noticed horrible freezes/pauses (beach ball) in day-to-day tasks. After turning it off again, my machine was back to being a great little Mac Mini Pro (16gb, 2.3 i7).

I have heard this story like 1 billion times that they do not need trim enabler.
However after a while I noticed my SSD had no more space left and the super smart SandForce should do all the work.

Well it didn't... And my SSD ended up cluttered with little free space left and the OS running terribly slow.

Then I decided to test TRIM Enabler and it works since 1 year with absolutely Zero problems.
No space clutter, no beach balls...

Sandforce???? I don;t think so... OCZ Vertex 3 fMac Edition.
 

murphychris

macrumors 6502a
Mar 19, 2012
661
2
I can vouch for these instructions used on 10.8.2 with a Samsung 830 SSD.

This modifies an existing .kext file on the system, to remove the APPLE SSD restriction for TRIM support. It doesn't replace the file.

I have no personal experience with "TRIM Enabler" software, but what I've read is that it replaces an existing kext with one of a different version. If that's true, this is definitely not a good practice. Kernel extensions of this sort are frequently kernel specific.

If your SSD is less than 70% full, it's likely that the firmware dynamic wear leveling is able to do sufficient garbage collection to avoid performance issues, and that's been the case with my Samsung SSD. But as it fills, or pages become fragmented, TRIM is the best way to inform the SSD that those pages can be garbage collected, whereas otherwise the only way the SSD can know this is if those pages are written to (it actually redirects the write to a different page ready for writing, while flagging the original page as being ready for erase).

So really, Apple is not being a good citizen here. This is sorta like the old days where they gave users a hard time about using 3rd party hard drives, instead of spending 2-3x on an Apple branded drive. So in a way, the more things change, the more they stay the same with Apple.

----------

So really, Apple is not being a good citizen here.

Just to put a fine point on this, Microsoft has a significantly larger percent of the market. Their users come across all sorts of weird junk that may not work exactly right. Yet Windows 7 supports the ATA TRIM command on any SSD that reports support for TRIM.

So, the world's most advanced desktop operating system, at about 6 months old, does not have a basic feature that 3 year old Windows 7 has, and is part of the ATA specification.
 
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