Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

TRIM Support Enabler

Hi there,

I have a 240GB OWC Mercury Exreme Pro Solid State Drive which was previously used in a 2009 Mac Pro as a startup drive. It was 45GB full and still quite speedy.

I would like to install this in a 2011 MacBook Pro, but I would like to first empty / delete everything on the SSD first. There is nothing on it that needs to be saved or backed up.

Can you please suggest a way I can do this without undermining the speed of the SSD? I have NOT enabaled TRIM support on this particular SSD, as I have read somewhere that it has some built-in 'Garbage Collection'.

Your advice is greatly appreciated. :)
 
I think this "don't waste your ssd cycles"-talk is slightely exaggerated,

heres from wikipedia:

"It matters whether the SSD drive uses SLC or MLC memory. SLC generally endures up to 100,000 write cycles or writes per cell, while MLC can endure anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 writes before it begins to fail"


and "begins to fail" doesnt even mean blocks become unaccessible, it just means they get gradually slower.
 
Last edited:
jenzjen said:
I've enabled it on my 2010 MBA with no issue and has been running since a week after Cindori made the original post.
Click to expand...
The MacBook Air has surface mounted SSD by Apple, as such it should come with TRIM already enabled, but I can check this with a friend who has an MBA.

Still, as the patch merely sets the SSD brand name and then enables the TRIM, running it can't do any harm. Bit like turning on a light switch, which is already ON. :)
 
Ger Teunis said:
So, let me get this right: you applied this hack on a device/ssd which has native trim support?
Click to expand...
You mean garbage collection, right? I didn't do enough research. Just posted to make sure other people who might not know don't end up doing the same thing.
 
Ger Teunis said:
Nope. Trim. Apple supports native trim on the ssd provided by apple. No patch required.
Click to expand...
After you enable the TRIM patch, if you check under TRIM active it says NO. It will only say YES after a reboot. What is the difference between native TRIM, TRIM from patch, and garbage collection?

Thanks.
 
Hi,

Thanks for a great tool.

I ran the tool in my MacPro 1,1 with SL and brand new OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (480GB) and it worked. However, now AJA tells me that my reading/writing speed has dropped by about 20MB/sec. Is this normal? I used to get 260MB/sec read, now get about 240MB/sec read. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
Are there any Xcode/Interface developers out there that have experience with creating user interfaces for mac?

(unrelated to trim enabler)

I would require some advise, please contact me at oskar@*groths.se remove the star.
 
neko girl said:
What is the difference between native TRIM, TRIM from patch, and garbage collection?
Click to expand...

In order for TRIM to work at all, two things need to happen:
1 - the drive must support it
2 - the OS must support it.

Most of the SSD's do, OS X doesn't (except for some exotic configurations in Macbook Pros with Apple SSD. This is where the patch comes from).
The patch allows non-Apple SSD's which support TRIM (1) on the drive side to communicate with the OS X which issues the TRIM command (2).

Garbage Collection is a feature that does more or less the same thing BUT doesn't need any input from the operating system and doesn't respond to a TRIM command - the drive handles all the operation by itself and is fully OS-independent. A SSD with Garbage Collection does not need TRIM support and therefore will not benefit from using the TRIM enabler. Actually, enabling TRIM in the OS X and a GC drive may conflict with the Garbage Collecion.
 
hwojtek said:
Garbage Collection is a feature that does more or less the same thing BUT doesn't need any input from the operating system and doesn't respond to a TRIM command - the drive handles all the operation by itself and is fully OS-independent. A SSD with Garbage Collection does not need TRIM support and therefore will not benefit from using the TRIM enabler. Actually, enabling TRIM in the OS X and a GC drive may conflict with the Garbage Collecion.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about that?
 
hwojtek said:
Garbage Collection is a feature that does more or less the same thing BUT doesn't need any input from the operating system and doesn't respond to a TRIM command - the drive handles all the operation by itself and is fully OS-independent. A SSD with Garbage Collection does not need TRIM support and therefore will not benefit from using the TRIM enabler. Actually, enabling TRIM in the OS X and a GC drive may conflict with the Garbage Collecion.
Click to expand...

And how does the garbage collector know which sectors are garbage if the operating system doesn't tell it with the TRIM command?!?
 
Basic75 said:
And how does the garbage collector know which sectors are garbage if the operating system doesn't tell it with the TRIM command?!?
Click to expand...

Ok, it seems to work partially; without TRIM when you

- delete a file, the drive still thinks the data is valid, and CAN'T collect the sectors it occupied as garbage;

- overwrite some data that only partially occupies a block (erase unit of the drive) and the new data with the same sector numbers ends up in a different physical location due to wear-levelling, then the drive CAN collect the sectors that it has just remapped as garbage.

So GC can actually do something without TRIM, however I stand by my initial observation that GC requires TRIM to work best; or "Trim will help with performance by limiting the pages that are copied during garbage collection." as stated by an SSD maker here: http://www.oczenterprise.com/whitepapers/ssds-write-amplification-trim-and-gc.pdf.
 
Tried Trim Enabler and had pretty bad results and had to revert back. Running a Mac Pro 3.33 Ghz with a Patriot Inferno 240GB SSD. On reboot, I noticed everything was sllllooowweeer. Proceeded to erase the free space. The disc quickly filled up and froze the Mac because it ran out of disk space.

Rebooted and the Mac got stuck in the spinning wheel. So rebooted into the Install Disc and run Disc Utilities. Ran Repair Disk and Repair Permissions. This fixed the boot problem.

Then tried this:

sudo chown root:admin /
sudo kextcache -system-prelinked-kernel
sudo kextcache -system-caches

Rebooted and noticed everything was loading slowly. Google Chrome loaded pages really slowly. Emptying trash emptied slowly.

So restored and everything is back to normal now. Wonder what i did wrong?

Tuncer
 
What shall we do, when Lion will be avaible, and supporting trim for MBA ?
I mean, before upgrading to Lion, shall we first restore to disable trim and after apply Lion, or can we just upgrade to Lion ?
 
Urgent! Please help!

My new Intel 320 SSD arrived today. I connected it to my iMac with a SATA->USB connector.

On the advise of a forum member I checked this thread and installed and patched my system with Trim Support Enabler.

I then proceed to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my system drive to the SSD but it stopped half way through because of errors with my internal drive. I tried to repair my internal drive with Disk Utility but it couldn't repair because of 'Invalid Node Structure'.

Now I can't boot into my system!!! I booted up from a second installation on my external drive, disk utility couldn't repair it from there either. Tried Disk Warrior but can't repair it either! What can I do!?!?

Did Trim Support Enabler cause this? Please help!
 
famusc said:
Is it confirmed from last beta that 10.6.8 will bring TRIM to all Macs?
Click to expand...

Nope, trim was still disabled for Corsair F120, enabled it again with Trim Enabler. fsck includes the trim step though.

So even when you do NOT enable trim, boot into single user mode (CMD-S during boot) and do an fsck -ffy it will trim all unused blocks.
 
Ger Teunis said:
Nope, trim was still disabled for Corsair F120, enabled it again with Trim Enabler. fsck includes the trim step though.

So even when you do NOT enable trim, boot into single user mode (CMD-S during boot) and do an fsck -ffy it will trim all unused blocks.
Click to expand...

I meant if 10.6.8 is confirmed to enable trim for original Apple SSDs for all Macs
 
Can anyone please tell me why it's necessary to change the ownership of root (/)? ls reports that it is indeed root:admin already... So why the terminal entry?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back