Apple quietly Trims MacBook Air SSDs
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Owners of second-gen MacBook Airs have gained much-requested Trim support for the SSDs in their skinny computers thanks to Apple's latest OS X update.
The Trim command can be issued to compatible solid-state drives to tell them which data are no longer considered in use and so can be erased by the drive itself.
This essentially ensures subsequent writes can be made to blocks the SSD knows to be empty, saving it from having to check and, if necessary, erase the block before writing the new data.
The upshot: faster writes and no performance degradation over time, because blocks marked empty actually are empty.
Apple add the Trim command to the version of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard code for the latest MacBook Pros, released earlier this year and which have SSD build-to-order options.
Older SSD-equipped Macs, including the SSD-only Airs, lacked Trim support until last week's release of Mac OS X 10.6.8, Air-owning forum posters at MacRumors have discovered.
Across-the-range Trim support wasn't previously expected to debut until Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
Do the Air drives also support Trim? Seemingly so, according to readouts from OS X's System Profiler app. ®
COMMENTS
No - read again.
You failed to read.
The reason I have SSD is beacuse it came in the "tin". I bought the "tin" because of the form factor.
I did not mention defragmentation.
I have not read even 1 article that suggests that TRIM is essential for OSX SSDs, and some that directly say otherwise.
So where is the evidence through testing?
I am not saying it's not there, just that I have never seen any references that seemed to support the idea - just kneejerk technodorks saying it is necessary because it IS on Windoze.
Dweeb
Does it actually work?
I tried the TRIM patch about a month or two ago on Crucial SSD-ed Macbook. After reading some of the comments on the site mentioned, about performance problems and even stability issues, I decided to uninstall it and wait for Lion.
The question is: just because it may say that it "works" - all we see is a TRIM enabled = yes.
Has anybody actually done benchmarking? Watched I/O traffic see TRIM ATA commands being issued?
Also, unless you start with a freshly reformatted SSD, what happens to blocks that had held deleted files in the "pre-TRIM" state? I suppose a SSD with GC will eventually get around to them?
PS: I love some of the comments on www.groths.org like this one "My PLEXTOR PX-128M2S thanks you, and I thank you. I enjoy a screaming fast laptop." Wow! Your laptop got faster just by installing that patch? /facepalm
RE: Did any testing body prove the need?
I think you'll find that TRIM is something that the drive manufacturers like to support, and is OS agnostic, and that even the Mac needs to do it to maintain high read/write throughput, assuming that is the reason you went for SSD rather than the usual "it's shiny" argument... and assuming Stevie J gave you the choice in the first place!
You're probably thinking of the whole defragmentation argument that Apple's HFS claimed to not need (it actually did it during file processing and in the background).
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