TRIM enabled for scratch disk?

[macguy93]

Hello Everyone,

I had a cheap SSD (OCZ vertex 3 120GB) laying around and i thought i would utilize it as a scratch disk until i buy something better. Getting into the more technical aspect of the drive, does having trim enabled or disabled matter to the file being stored on that drive? Would it impair any performance of after effects or premiere if trim was enabled or disabled? or is trim completely irrelevant for this case?

I understand that the drive is cheap and a bit small, but for now I'm hoping i can get by with slightly better performance while having the media off the same drive as the boot drive.

Workstation setup:
1TB HD for archiving
512GB Apple SSD for OS?Applications
120GB OCZ SSD for scratch


Thanks in advance!

 

[AidenShaw]

Hello Everyone,

I had a cheap SSD (OCZ vertex 3 120GB) laying around and i thought i would utilize it as a scratch disk until i buy something better. Getting into the more technical aspect of the drive, does having trim enabled or disabled matter to the file being stored on that drive? Would it impair any performance of after effects or premiere if trim was enabled or disabled? or is trim completely irrelevant for this case?

I understand that the drive is cheap and a bit small, but for now I'm hoping i can get by with slightly better performance while having the media off the same drive as the boot drive.

Workstation setup:
1TB HD for archiving
512GB Apple SSD for OS?Applications
120GB OCZ SSD for scratch


Thanks in advance!

The drive will last longer and be faster with TRIM enabled.

I can't really think of any reason not to have TRIM enabled. Most systems don't even offer the choice - if the drive supports TRIM the OS uses it.

 

[macguy93]

The drive will last longer and be faster with TRIM enabled.

I can't really think of any reason not to have TRIM enabled. Most systems don't even offer the choice - if the drive supports TRIM the OS uses it.

I've heard of many ways to enable trim. I hear trim enabler isn't the best app to do this. Are there any other recommended ways of performing this?

 

[flowrider]

^^^^TRIM Enabler works for me. IMHO, the author is one of the Good Guys and deserves our support.

Lou

 

[crjackson2134]

Trim Enabler is an awesome little applet.

You can enable Trim yourself through the terminal, Trim Enabler or Chameleon SSD Optimizer. They all do the same thing Apple does, but Trim Enabler keeps a monitor applet in the toolbar that let's you know if Trim becomes disabled for any reason (usually OS updates). It also has other useful features built in.

 

[macguy93]

Trim Enabler is an awesome little applet.

You can enable Trim yourself through the terminal, Trim Enabler or Chameleon SSD Optimizer. They all do the same thing Apple does, but Trim Enabler keeps a monitor applet in the toolbar that let's you know if Trim becomes disabled for any reason (usually OS updates). It also has other useful features built in.

how do you enable trim on a drive that is not running your OS? i installed trim enabler, but it says that the current drive i have already has trim enabled (Which my apple SSD does) how do i select a specific drive to enable trim on there?

 

[Cindori]

how do you enable trim on a drive that is not running your OS? i installed trim enabler, but it says that the current drive i have already has trim enabled (Which my apple SSD does) how do i select a specific drive to enable trim on there?

Trim is a system-wide feature, meaning that it will apply to all Trim-supported drives in the system.

Trim Enabler currently only gives you a status update about the first SSD in your system, but I'm looking to improve this.

 

[AidenShaw]

Trim is a system-wide feature, meaning that it will apply to all Trim-supported drives in the system.

Trim Enabler currently only gives you a status update about the first SSD in your system, but I'm looking to improve this.

When Trim Enabler is installed, does it "TRIM" all drives - or should one fill free space with a temp file, and then delete it to trigger the "TRIM"?

 

[Cindori]

When Trim Enabler is installed, does it "TRIM" all drives - or should one fill free space with a temp file, and then delete it to trigger the "TRIM"?

No it does not. Yeah you can do that to instantly trim most part of your disk.

 

[Weaselboy]

When Trim Enabler is installed, does it "TRIM" all drives - or should one fill free space with a temp file, and then delete it to trigger the "TRIM"?

After you enable TRIM, boot to single user mode (command-s boot) then enter "fsck -fy" without the quotes at the command line and that will TRIM all unused blocks on the drive. Then enter reboot.

 

[hfg]

When Trim Enabler is installed, does it "TRIM" all drives - or should one fill free space with a temp file, and then delete it to trigger the "TRIM"?

I have found that the Mavericks Disk Utility "Repair" will force-trim all empty space, especially useful for cleaning up a just formatted SSD. There do seem to be some requirements:

- select the formatted disk, not the top-level disk to "repair".
- "trim" should be enabled
- the SSD being repaired must be on a trim-capable interface (i.e. NOT in a USB 3.0 dock or enclosure)

At the end of the repair status messages, you will see a message that all free space has been trimmed.


-howad

 

[macguy93]

Trim is a system-wide feature, meaning that it will apply to all Trim-supported drives in the system.

Trim Enabler currently only gives you a status update about the first SSD in your system, but I'm looking to improve this.

With that being said, does that mean that there is no way that i can enable trim for this drive? (if i understand correctly)

I have found that the Mavericks Disk Utility "Repair" will force-trim all empty space, especially useful for cleaning up a just formatted SSD. There do seem to be some requirements:

- select the formatted disk, not the top-level disk to "repair".
- "trim" should be enabled
- the SSD being repaired must be on a trim-capable interface (i.e. NOT in a USB 3.0 dock or enclosure)

At the end of the repair status messages, you will see a message that all free space has been trimmed.

i followed your steps but did not seem to force trim to enable. I just formatted the drive last week and have put nothing on the drive since. i opened Disk utility (while booted in the os. not in recovery) and elected that drive and chose "Repair" but i did not get that message?

 

[hfg]

I have found that the Mavericks Disk Utility "Repair" will force-trim all empty space, especially useful for cleaning up a just formatted SSD. There do seem to be some requirements:

- select the formatted disk, not the top-level disk to "repair".
- "trim" should be enabled
- the SSD being repaired must be on a trim-capable interface (i.e. NOT in a USB 3.0 dock or enclosure)

At the end of the repair status messages, you will see a message that all free space has been trimmed.


-howad

i followed your steps but did not seem to force trim to enable. I just formatted the drive last week and have put nothing on the drive since. i opened Disk utility (while booted in the os. not in recovery) and elected that drive and chose "Repair" but i did not get that message?

Perhaps there is another "requirement" that I am unaware of that my system has by default?

Here is what I see (note the 4th line from the bottom):
There is a significant delay when it hits the line "Trimming unused blocks." before it finishes the sequence.

You cannot "repair" the disk that you are currently booted from ... you must either boot from another disk or boot to the recovery partition to perform the "repair". (tnx Cindori)


.

 

[DPUser]

When Trim Enabler is installed, does it "TRIM" all drives - or should one fill free space with a temp file, and then delete it to trigger the "TRIM"?

Aiden, how would you recommend creating the properly sized temp file?

 

[Cindori]

i followed your steps but did not seem to force trim to enable. I just formatted the drive last week and have put nothing on the drive since. i opened Disk utility (while booted in the os. not in recovery) and elected that drive and chose "Repair" but i did not get that message?

Disk Utility will not perform all "Disk Repair" steps (trim included) if you are booted from the same disk. You have to boot recovery partition or another Mac OS.

Aiden, how would you recommend creating the properly sized temp file?

Just take some large file (HD-movie?) and copy it until the disk is full. Drag to trash and empty. It's the fastest way without going through the terminal.

 

[DPUser]

Just take some large file (HD-movie?) and copy it until the disk is full. Drag to trash and empty. It's the fastest way without going through the terminal.

Thank you sir!

 

[AidenShaw]

Aiden, how would you recommend creating the properly sized temp file?

Just take some large file (HD-movie?) and copy it until the disk is full. Drag to trash and empty. It's the fastest way without going through the terminal.

Cindori's advice, unfortunately, does a tiny bit of wear to your device. (You want to avoid real writes - they are what wears out the disk.)

The disk utility bit (which really only seems to call "fsck" from a GUI wrapper) is better - since it doesn't actually write to the empty space on the disk, but instead issues TRIM commands for all of the free extents.

The disk utility bit (or fsck) also gives you explicit feedback - if you don't see the line "TRIMming free blocks" that means that TRIM is not enabled on that disk.

Copying an HD movie - you'd never know if TRIM is actually enabled or not. You could add a bit of wear to the device and not realize that it did not help at all.

Don't be afraid of the terminal - it's one of the more powerful features of Apple OSX.

___

For Windows systems, from an elevated command prompt issue the command

contig -l -n disk:\foo nnnnnnnnnn
del disk:\foo

where nnnnnnnnnn is a megabyte or so smaller than you see as the free space for

dir disk:\

"contig" is in the SysInternals suite available through Microsoft.

Note that "contig -l -n" is nearly instantaneous whether you're creating a 4 KiB file or a 4 TiB file. It doesn't write data to the file - it uses the APIs used to create pagefiles to quickly create large, non-sparse files. When you delete the file, the system issues TRIM commands on all of the free'd extents.

 

[DPUser]

A couple more questions:

I'm running Mountain Lion on my studio Mac Pro... with Trim enabled, will Disc Utility under this version of OSX give the same results (Trim unused space) as Disc Utility under Mavericks?

I have multiple SSD's in my MP, one of which is the startup drive. If I run "fsck -fy" with Trim enabled, will it Trim all of my SSDs? Can I specify the drive(s) to be Trimmed at some point?

Thank You All!

 

[hfg]

A couple more questions:

I'm running Mountain Lion on my studio Mac Pro... with Trim enabled, will Disc Utility under this version of OSX give the same results (Trim unused space) as Disc Utility under Mavericks?

I have multiple SSD's in my MP, one of which is the startup drive. If I run "fsck -fy" with Trim enabled, will it Trim all of my SSDs? Can I specify the drive(s) to be Trimmed at some point?

Thank You All!

I don't know when the trim was first available in the Disk Utility Repair function. I noticed it by accident when I was cleaning up some old SSD drives ... and I was running Mavericks at the time. I don't have any systems with older OS versions on them to try ... but you can try it yourself as it is a non-destructive command.

The Disk Utility method repairs (and trims) only the disk that you have selected. I haven't used the terminal fsck -fy command, but I assume you have to select the disk you wish to use with the shell commands prior to running the fsck command.

 

[Weaselboy]

I have multiple SSD's in my MP, one of which is the startup drive. If I run "fsck -fy" with Trim enabled, will it Trim all of my SSDs? Can I specify the drive(s) to be Trimmed at some point?

You can make it run on other disks. Enter df in Terminal to get a list of volumes and ID the /dev/disk path to the one you want. It will be something like /dev/disk2s2.

The run this Terminal command using your real disk number.

sudo fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk2s2

 

[DPUser]

You can make it run on other disks. Enter df in Terminal to get a list of volumes and ID the /dev/disk path to the one you want. It will be something like /dev/disk2s2.

The run this Terminal command using your real disk number.

sudo fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk2s2

Gracias!

 

[mcaswell]

Trim is a system-wide feature, meaning that it will apply to all Trim-supported drives in the system.

I interpreted this statement (possibly incorrectly) to mean that on a nMP, because TRIM was enabled (on the internal), it would also be enabled on other SSDs.

I have a couple of SanDisk SSDs in a Thunderbolt enclosure, and when I checked the System Report, it said TRIM was not enabled on these (just on the internal drive). Ran TRIM Enabler, and now these external drives are showing TRIM as being enabled.

 

[Studio K]

I
- the SSD being repaired must be on a trim-capable interface (i.e. NOT in a USB 3.0 dock or enclosure)

At the end of the repair status messages, you will see a message that all free space has been trimmed.

Could I do this from a clone of my system volume on a hard disk attached externally (USB docking station)?
The 'target' drive is the internal ssd.

Or do both drives need to be connected internally (via SATA cables)?

 

[hfg]

Could I do this from a clone of my system volume on a hard disk attached externally (USB docking station)?
The 'target' drive is the internal ssd.

Or do both drives need to be connected internally (via SATA cables)?

I think that should work, or you could boot the internal drive into the recovery mode and use Disk Utility from there. You can't "repair" the disk you are logged in to ... I don't think the button is even active in that case.

The "target SSD" can be internal on a SATA port, or external on a eSATA or Thunderbolt/SATA interface. It won't work if the SSD is on USB 3.0 as trim isn't supported.

 

[DPUser]

Just letting folks know that Mountain Lion Disk Utility will also trim SSDs as part of the Repair Disk process if Trim is enabled before repair. Also, as HFG noted, Boot Drive can't be repaired, so you must boot from another drive to repair the boot SSD. Make sure Trim is enabled on that boot drive, too!

Thanks for the tip HFG. and Cindori for Trim Enabler.

As noted by HFG:

I have found that the Mavericks Disk Utility "Repair" will force-trim all empty space, especially useful for cleaning up a just formatted SSD. There do seem to be some requirements:

- select the formatted disk, not the top-level disk to "repair".
- "trim" should be enabled
- the SSD being repaired must be on a trim-capable interface (i.e. NOT in a USB 3.0 dock or enclosure)

At the end of the repair status messages, you will see a message that all free space has been trimmed.