lack of TRIM and SSD performance in new Air

[silversx]

I picked up a new 11inch air and have been reading up on some of the drawbacks of using SSD and apple's lack of TRIM support.

since this is my first laptop with ssd.. can anyone who have used ssd apple products before chime in on the real world effects of not having TRIM to wipe the disk to prevent slowdown over time?

and how much exactly is the slowdown % wise at worse case scenerio?

thanks

 

[freyrrr]

I picked up a new 11inch air and have been reading up on some of the drawbacks of using SSD and apple's lack of TRIM support.

since this is my first laptop with ssd.. can anyone who have used ssd apple products before chime in on the real world effects of not having TRIM to wipe the disk to prevent slowdown over time?

and how much exactly is the slowdown % wise at worse case scenerio?

thanks

I have been using various SSDs with Macbooks for two years, there is no slowdown I can notice.

 

[acb2m]

I'm also interested in this. Will apple support Trim in the future and will this take care of any slowdown that might be experienced between now and when it is supported? Or is this completely overblown and not something that will be noticeable.

 

[WardC]

Mac OS X has good built-in garbage collection and management and TRIM is really not necessary for good SSD performance on the Mac. On a PC, yes, it is probably not a necessity but the Mac OS handles everything quite well and the SSD performance does not degrade substantially over time.

 

[halledise]

I'm with WardC - the combo of Mac OS X and (especially) the new Flash storage renders commands like TRIM somewhat obsolete.

slowdown over time would be almost immeasurable, and even if one felt it to be the case, then a backup, erase and reinstall would speed things up again - though I have to say it is now less necessary than ever before.

that said, it is now only a 1 hour process these days, depending on how many apps you're loading on and how long it takes to transfer your home folder back.

 

[acb2m]

Great, thanks for the info.

 

[barefeats]

Mac OS X has good built-in garbage collection and management and TRIM is really not necessary for good SSD performance on the Mac. On a PC, yes, it is probably not a necessity but the Mac OS handles everything quite well and the SSD performance does not degrade substantially over time.

It has been demonstated clearly that SSDs without overprovisioning and load leveling will not only slow down but can even become unusable. Check out this article by Lloyd Chambers:
http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-BeforeAfter-Intel160G2.html

We ran similar thrashing of Crucial drives and saw significant drop in write speed. However OCZ Vertex 2 and OWC SSDs exhibited no drop in speed.

 

[Leo Fischel]

It has been demonstated clearly that SSDs without overprovisioning and load leveling will not only slow down but can even become unusable. Check out this article by Lloyd Chambers:
http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-BeforeAfter-Intel160G2.html

We ran similar thrashing of Crucial drives and saw significant drop in write speed. However OCZ Vertex 2 and OWC SSDs exhibited no drop in speed.

The graph does not look good. I am waiting for the first real life experiences of the drop of speed before I buy an air ...

 

[acb2m]

So this is or isn't going to be a problem down the road? If it is it sounds like theres a solution tho.

 

[admanimal]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-11-13inch-reviewed/4

 

[barefeats]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-11-13inch-reviewed/4

With all due respect to Anandtech -- and they are due much respect -- a 20 minute random test is not a very rigorous test of performance fall off or the lack of it.

The test on MacPerformanceGuide involves
running the initial speed test
filling the drive
erasing the drive
filling the drive
erasing the drive
cloning OS X to the drive
running a virtual memory test
erasing the drive
creating 20 million 8K files
erasing the drive
running the final speed test

http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-Seasoning.html

 

[northerngit]

I found this an interesting read back in July:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/7

We started off this article making it intentionally limited in scope as we weren't expecting, in a OS that doesn't support TRIM, to find anything all that interesting. What we found was the exact opposite: an OS that doesn't appear to be affected by SSD performance degradation, at least if you stick to the SSD Apple provides - but if you do stick with that SSD, you get, by modern PC standards, decidedly substandard performance. This one raises many more questions than it answers, and we're going to investigate further.

There are obviously more in depth conclusions reached - but I'm not sure how this relates to the new MBA revision...

 

[OSMac]

Couple of points / questions ...

1. OSX's system profiler... Hardware/Serial ATA/Apple SSD shows the SSD does not support TRIM.

Is that meaning even if OSX does come to support trim the drives used in the Air will not use it?

2. Anandtech wrote:
"A single pass of sequential writes restores performance to normal."

How would one do the above pass?

 

[NintendoFan]

With all due respect to Anandtech -- and they are due much respect -- a 20 minute random test is not a very rigorous test of performance fall off or the lack of it.

The test on MacPerformanceGuide involves
running the initial speed test
filling the drive
erasing the drive
filling the drive
erasing the drive
cloning OS X to the drive
running a virtual memory test
erasing the drive
creating 20 million 8K files
erasing the drive
running the final speed test

http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-Seasoning.html

Well, it's probably because of the controller being used, considering he already reviewed it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2968/...s-30gb-ssdnow-v-series-battle-of-the-125-ssds

 

[barefeats]

Couple of points / questions ...

1. OSX's system profiler... Hardware/Serial ATA/Apple SSD shows the SSD does not support TRIM.

Is that meaning even if OSX does come to support trim the drives used in the Air will not use it?

2. Anandtech wrote:
"A single pass of sequential writes restores performance to normal."

How would one do the above pass?

Ans to #1: I use SSDs that support TRIM in my Mac Pro but OS X still says "no" to TRIM support. In other words, the "no" doesn't mean the SSD doesn't support it but that OS X doesn't support it -- yet.

Ans to #2: One way is to use the digLloyd Tools which has a "recondition SSD" function:
http://diglloydtools.com/

 

[ewhite]

To share - I have a brand name 64GB SSD pulled out of a high-end laptop when these first came out (2008) running in a custom desktop config (PC unfortunately :-(. Outside of updating the firmware, I have never run any TRIM commands or other cleanup on the hardware which Windows 7 does support.

Disk is still blazingly fast, and I've re-installed the OS from scratch several times and really used the disk extensively for large downloads. Sure, it's probably a bit slow than new, but still blaaaazingly fast especially on boot to a Windows OS.

 

[bugout]

Mac OS X has good built-in garbage collection and management and TRIM is really not necessary for good SSD performance on the Mac.

Holy crap. Did you just make that up?

That is so far beyond the truth I can't even believe you said it.

 

[stockscalper]

Holy crap. Did you just make that up?

That is so far beyond the truth I can't even believe you said it.

Really? OS X isn't Windows with all its needs for constant maintenance. When was the last time you had to defrag a Mac drive?

 

[wirelessness]

Really? OS X isn't Windows with all its needs for constant maintenance. When was the last time you had to defrag a Mac drive?

Defrag and Trim are not the same thing. You can't improve an SSD by running defrag in fact it's the opposite, you can trash an SSD by running Defrag. Do some reading to understand the way SSD drives write files and why a controller that supports background garbage collection is very beneficial. OSX does not support SSD background garbage collection.

 

[kntgsp]

I picked up a new 11inch air and have been reading up on some of the drawbacks of using SSD and apple's lack of TRIM support.

since this is my first laptop with ssd.. can anyone who have used ssd apple products before chime in on the real world effects of not having TRIM to wipe the disk to prevent slowdown over time?

and how much exactly is the slowdown % wise at worse case scenerio?

thanks

Relatively little. Anandtech goes into it, read their review.

 

[wirelessness]

Relatively little. Anandtech goes into it, read their review.

Are you reading the SAME Anantech reports that everyone else is?

Quote:
"I often get questions from Mac users asking what the best SSD is for OS X. Since Apple still won’t support TRIM you need a very resilient drive under OS X. That path leads you to SandForce. Pick up a Corsair Force, OCZ Vertex 2, G.Skill Phoenix or whatever SF drive tickles your fancy if you want the best of the best in your Mac." Anand Lal Shimpi

 

[FuNGi]

Just got off the phone with Applecare and asked them what they thought Apple would do if I take my 13" Air into an Apple Store in 2 years with complaints about significantly slowed performance of my SSD. This is the big fear of the non-TRIM OS's and the reason posters are here in this, and other, threads.

First, I agree that not every agent is as well informed as the next the person. This agent agreed that:
1) Apple currently has no policy regarding degraded SSD performance as it is currently a non-issue, and
2) if performance falls to say, 50% "perceived", Apple will replace the SSD as it did with the 8600GT years before Nvidia was forced to. The "perceived" is in qoutes because I asked her how this could possibly be tested objectively. She claimed hardware specification tests could detect this. I wonder if Apple has the equivalent benchmarking software that we see many iterations of in the news?

 

[gloryunited]

I'd like to do a fresh install of OS X on the 2010 late MBA that I've used for a month. As I have to format the SSD and back-up anyway, what can I do to "recondition" the SSD?

If I were to go into boot camp Windows to run TRIM (which I've never tried before), what steps should I take?

thanks

 

[size100]

Really? OS X isn't Windows with all its needs for constant maintenance. When was the last time you had to defrag a Mac drive?

Yes, it is really not true. Put an SSD with poor garbage collection on a mac and it will slow down significantly.

In this case its 'windows 7 is not OSX', no need to worry about things like missing TRIM.

This has nothing to do with windows. We are talking about OSX not windows........ so we need to worry about this. But, since you mention it, windows supports trim. Hassle free. No real life slowdown. No defrags. In this case OSX is missing a significant feature, especially if you are adding an SSD to a MBP. In which case you have to worry about which drive will slow down faster.

When was the last time you had to worry about not having TRIM in windows? Windows7 its not OSX.


The type of drive and the controller it uses is a significant improvement over most drives. From what we see the performance decrease is smaller, but is not up to par with what you would see with TRIM.

 

[fs454]

By the time this all will happen:


1. Lion will be out, maybe even something further.

2. There'll be tons and tons of aftermarket options for SSDs that will increase storage for not too much cash.