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lack of TRIM and SSD performance in new Air
- Thread starter silversx
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I guess. It would be insane for them not to adopt TRIM, now that the MBAs are selling like hotcakes and SSDs are becoming more and more prominent and affordable.
I know this is an old thread that was bumped up, but anyways, this is the related Anantech article, not the other links posted. The issue really comes down to the controller. Worth a read.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review
From the article...
"The benefit of this is you get peak performance out of the drive regardless of how much you use it, which is perfect for an OS without TRIM support - ahem, OS X. Now you can see why Apple chose this controller."
The idea is that there are other ways to accomplish what TRIM does. This controller uses garbage collection to recoup space instead of relying on the OS to do it as with TRIM.
The selective reading and quoting that's going on with those articles is hysterical .
And garbage collection and Trim are not the same ....
You do realize that we're in an Air forum and our "Benevolent" Apple has decided to kill all our 3rd party ssd options for the latest gen air. To think I was salivating over the possibility of a 512gb Sandforce ssd in my MBA13!
They killed exactly one third party option over a licensing issue. Since mSATA is a standard, they can't kill them all. I don't know if the new Intel SSDs will work, but for the moment they don't provide much of an option since they max out at 80GB.
Let me quote myself...
Do I need to format the Mac partition to NTFS/FAT32/ExFAT in order to "TRIM" it from boot camp Windows 7?
also, why does erasing (zero-out) data on the drive not do the trick? isn't it really "deleting" the data on the drive?
Yes, Windows 7 can only TRIM a partition formatted using one of those file systems.
Zeroing out actually makes matters worse because it writes "0" onto each sector. Reconditioning an SSD requires completely erasing each sector.
I am confident that in a year or so that there will be tons of aftermarket options. That one aftermarket option was killed within a week of the notebook's release for good reason, or else they'd only move the 64gb base models and everybody would be buying those SSDs.
Nobody needs to worry. It's not like we're going to be stuck without a solution when and if this even happens.
Trim is not some sort of reconditioning action, it needs to be used by the OS to have an effect; in other words, briefly running Windows on an SSD will not recondition or otherwise improve the drive .
There is a tool by Diglloyd that supposedly works .
No, since a brand new SSD will have completely clear sectors. The point of reconditioning is to fully erase sectors that have previously been written to but are now available to be re-written.
Looks like it doesn't
I think it may just be that the box shows "no" because OS X doesn't support TRIM. I recall running a command line script from within Windows 7 in Boot Camp and it appeared to indicate that it does have TRIM support. I don't recall the command, however.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-11-13inch-reviewed/4
According to that, it just reports does the SSD support TRIM or not. Otherwise it would always be no since OS X does not support TRIM
Yes, but for all we know that's a meaningless box that's just in there in preparation for a soft patch later on. Do we know if OS X will report TRIM support on any drive, including one with known TRIM support?
FYI, the command described here is the one I ran. It appears it doesn't give definitive information:
http://superuser.com/questions/145697/how-do-i-know-if-my-ssd-drive-supports-trim
I just asked from my mate with 120GB OWC in his MBP and he said it reported no TRIM support, even though there is TRIM support with that drive in Windows 7. So looks like you were right
From the article in the link, it says we can use the "Erase free space" function in Disk Utility to recondition it. But "Zero out deleted files" is one of the three options that we are given in "Erase free space".
So does it help or does it make matters worse???
I've noticed the built-in SSDs from Apple also don't support native command queuing.
Looks like Apple has some work to do with SSD performance in Lion. However, even without TRIM and NCQ the speed improvements with an SSD (especially compared to Apple's stock choice of 5400 RPM notebook drives) are enormous.
Looks like Apple has some work to do with SSD performance in Lion. However, even without TRIM and NCQ the speed improvements with an SSD (especially compared to Apple's stock choice of 5400 RPM notebook drives) are enormous.
They don't support NCQ, but from my tests on Windows, the drives do support TRIM.