New MacBook Airs: Flash drive TRIM Support?

[barmann]

In defense of Kustardking, I think he's right when he says it's impossible to predict how the MBA SSDs will perform in the long run, and that their performance doesn't look impressive on paper.
Apple hasn't done much to address the matter of degradation, afaik, if anything, or maybe I just missed the memo.

What further confuses the issue are the many people who report the great performance of SSDs in Macs, yet only refer to the rather inconclusive boot and app launch times in many cases.

I'm going to buy a maxed out 11", and will keep an eye on the drive performance and save benchmark results - I'm not an expert, but I expect it to suffer quite a bit within a year, after all I've heard about SSDs on Mac so far.
If that actually happens, I'll walk to the store with my benchmark collection and have a little chat.

 

[RanEnRui]

It has been confirmed via iFixit's teardown that the 11.6" model is using a Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller along with a Micron OKA17 D9HSJ DRAM cache.

It appears that this controller has native TRIM support. It is rated at 230MBps read and 180MBps write speed.

I cannot imagine that the 13.3" version uses a different controller.

 

[yegon]

And this is the unfortunate intersection between tech and design. Apple has great industrial design, but is providing less and less for the prosumer/enthusiast. Does the term "enthusiast" make you angry? Then you should not be contributing to this thread. Glossy displays? Can't alter your device after purchase? You know what has those qualities? TVs. Apple is going 100% consumer, and as a creative person who also loves technology and aesthetics, I'm bummed.

Well said, perfectly encapsulates my feelings on the subject...sadly

It consistently astounds me that no other tech company in similar fields come even close to Apple in the area of design, or even make a concerted effort to do so. The absence of competition in this regard explains Apple's at times mystifying decisions that, essentially, they get away with simply because they can.

 

[yegon]

this is what I unfortunately do.. I'm in need of doing this again actually heh

Sounds farcical, but I'm interested as I intend to get a 11" shortly. What's the minimum footprint of Win7 these days? I'm getting a 128gb model and I'd be willing to sacrifice some space to do that procedure, if indeed it's needed. Also, I assume I could just restore a Time Machine backup to the freshly TRIM'd (for want of a better word) drive?

 

[RanEnRui]

Sounds farcical, but I'm interested as I intend to get a 11" shortly. What's the minimum footprint of Win7 these days? I'm getting a 128gb model and I'd be willing to sacrifice some space to do that procedure, if indeed it's needed. Also, I assume I could just restore a Time Machine backup to the freshly TRIM'd (for want of a better word) drive?

Without using something like nLite\vLite... I believe it's right under 8GB.

IIRC, the "trimness" of the drive is at the hardware level. Think of it as a specialized defrag for SSDs.

 

[yegon]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Just install Windows 7 onto a separate partition, and every few months, format the Mac partition with NTFS, boot into Windows 7, run the TRIM command, then reformat it back to HFS+ and install OS X. Problem solved.

Bought a 11" ultimate in store this morning, woo!

Anyway, I'm thinking about installing Win7 for the above purposes. Would it make any difference if I install Win7 in, say, 6 months and ran this process, or should I install Win7 in readiness now, while the drive is still factory fresh? What I mean to say is, is there any disadvantage to installing Win7 later given that the drive will already have took a thrashing 6 months down the line? I'm not a computer noob, but where SSD's are concerned I'm as green as grass, heh.

Cheers.

 

[bamf]

Bought a 11" ultimate in store this morning, woo!

Anyway, I'm thinking about installing Win7 for the above purposes. Would it make any difference if I install Win7 in, say, 6 months and ran this process, or should I install Win7 in readiness now, while the drive is still factory fresh? What I mean to say is, is there any disadvantage to installing Win7 later given that the drive will already have took a thrashing 6 months down the line? I'm not a computer noob, but where SSD's are concerned I'm as green as grass, heh.

Cheers.

Anandtech published a great article on the SSD Apple uses in the Air this week. It has the most aggressive garbage collection he's ever seen. I think Trim is irrelevant for the Air.

 

[barmann]

Anandtech published a great article on the SSD Apple uses in the Air this week. It has the most aggressive garbage collection he's ever seen. I think Trim is irrelevant for the Air.

Is it this review ?

The conclusion was 'not half bad' in most respects in this article, with garbage collection being good but some degredation noticable, and an unknown in the long term.

 

[yegon]

Interesting.

Going back to my question, if I choose to go the Windows 7 route, is there any difference if I choose to install that in 6 months and then trim? Or install Win7 now?

 

[NintendoFan]

Is it this review ?

The conclusion was 'not half bad' in most respects in this article, with garbage collection being good but some degredation noticable, and an unknown in the long term.

No, this one: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review

 

[bamf]

Is it this review ?

The conclusion was 'not half bad' in most respects in this article, with garbage collection being good but some degredation noticable, and an unknown in the long term.

No, this one: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review

Yes, it's the one NintendoFan references. It's a decent read...

 

[barmann]

No, this one: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review

Thanks , good read !

From the article :
(This is partly about the tested Kingston SSD, and I don't suggest the MBA's drive won't be working well for a long time, just saying it looks to me like the final word is still out , and how could it not be given the tender age of the new MBA ).

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.

There is a downside however: write amplification. For every 4KB we randomly write to a location on the drive, the actual amount of data written is much, much greater. It's the cost of constantly cleaning/reorganizing the drive for performance. While I haven't had any 50nm, 4xnm or 3xnm NAND physically wear out on me, the V+100 is the most likely to blow through those program/erase cycles. Keep in mind that at the 3xnm node you no longer have 10,000 cycles, but closer to 5,000 before your NAND dies. On nearly all drives we've tested this isn't an issue, but I would be concerned about the V+100. Concerned enough to recommend running it with 20% free space at all times (at least). The more free space you have, the better job the controller can do wear leveling.

 

[FuNGi]

Good to know. I'll try and keep my 128GB Air below 100 GB of files. Should be easy as this is just my 'satellite' computer. Hopefully, in 2-3 years I'll be able to pick up a 512 GB replacement SSD for it at a reasonable price

 

[jimboutilier]

All I can say is that I ran a 13" RevC 2.13/2/128 hard for a year and even with a lot of Virtual Machine use did not notice any performance degradation. Thats not to say some benchmarking tool might not pickup some small difference but from a user perspective there was nothing noticeable from the "old horrible samsing ssd".

This new 11" 1.6/4/128 seems faster in everyday use (and benchmarks faster but thats not as important to me) and I don't expect I'll ever notice performance degradation with it either.

I want to spend as much time as possible using my machine rather than maintaining it so as long as it offers a great user experience I don't let the technical details bother me much. One of the reasons I left the Wintel platform for the Mactel one.

 

[NintendoFan]

This new 11" 1.6/4/128 seems faster in everyday use (and benchmarks faster but thats not as important to me) and I don't expect I'll ever notice performance degradation with it either.

Well, you're certainly not going to notice it in the new one, because, frankly it is nonexistent.

 

[gwsat]

This new 11" 1.6/4/128 seems faster in everyday use (and benchmarks faster but thats not as important to me) and I don't expect I'll ever notice performance degradation with it either.

Well, you're certainly not going to notice it in the new one, because, frankly it is nonexistent.

The conventional wisdom about flash storage is that it does degrade over time. The flash storage in the new MBAs, though, has been in the field such a short time, it's too early to know whether it will degrade over time. Is there something you know but I don't about some aspect of the MBAs' flash storage that woud prevent it from degrading over time?

 

[barmann]

Is there something you know but I don't about some aspect of the MBAs' flash storage that woud prevent it from degrading over time?

Oh, an ignoramus ....
He knows the obvious - Apple always gets it right !