How long/soon do you guys think we have to wait till OS X gets TRIM support? Do you think we will get it in 10.6.5 or do you think we will have to wait till 10.7?
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TRIM Support?
- Thread starter ccashman92
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dunno, would be great.
I am waiting for 2 factors before I sell my house for an full on SSD
1. Price to come down, or at least same prices but bump the specs. (60 is 120, 120 is 180, etc)
2. TRIM
one thing that really gets on my nerves with apple is the fact that if they didnt invent it they take years to implement it!
It is annoying that there is no TRIM support in OSX.
Yes some of the drives like the Sandforce-1200 based ones don't really need TRIM as they have garbage collection but why not support TRIM so you can use what ever drive you want?
Microsoft have had TRIM support for ages. I didn't have an SSD when the beta was out last year but I'm pretty sure it supported it then!? It certainly has done since it was released in October last year.
Microsoft didn't have TRIM for "ages". They only implemented in in Win7. And yes, lack of TRIM on Mac OS X is annoying. I have to use GParted to refresh my SSD from time to time.
Reading back my post I realise I've worded it poorly, sorry
It should have read...
"Microsoft have had TRIM support for ages in terms SSD's as we know them. I didn't have an SSD when the Windows 7 beta was out last year but I'm pretty sure it supported it then!? It certainly has done since Windows 7 was released in October last year."
What I was trying to say was.... I think 18 months (if you count the beta) is a long time in the scheme of things considering SSD's have only really stated to break through in the same time period. I know they have been around for h
My plan was to do as you do and level the drive every now and then to get it back up to speed but as we've all sort of agreed. We shouldn't have too, OSX should support TRIM and sort it all out for us.
I agreed that it would be awesome if it was all dealt with at a hardware level thing and that was that but it's not
The thing I don't understand is it's not like TRIM has only been around for a week or two and it's not just some random bloke who's coded it.
The issue I have with it is lack of choice. Only 'some' of the drives have support for there own garbage collection.
> Windows your fine with a TRIM enabled SSD or one with good garage collection built in.
> OSX you have to have one with garage collection or your scuppered.
As TRIM is a set standard and garage collection is and individual thing to the controller why not include TRIM support for those with TRIM drives and let the garage collection enabled controllers do there own thing.
It just don't like how Apple have limited people. But that's just me.
--edit--
Me too
TRIM is still a draft spec.
http://www.t13.org/Documents/Upload..._Attachment-8_-_Serial_Transport_ATA8-AST.pdf
http://www.t13.org/Documents/Upload..._Attachment-8_-_Serial_Transport_ATA8-AST.pdf
I have no specific knowledge on the issue but in general one would imagine that OS (software) is in a much better position to optimize data distribution on the disk because it knows exactly the size of all files whereas SSD does not. If SSD gets a command from OS to, say, create/write a block of data, that's all it knows. Is it good enough level of details to be able to optimize the work? I do not know but obviously that OS and SSD deal with different level of abstraction/details and therefore there might be big differences in what is achievable from these two levels.
Perhaps, but your also then using CPU cycles and memory. Slows the machine down. Has anyone got any concrete proof?
With a statement like this:
No its not.
GC is a poor substitute for TRIM.
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It needs to be backed up with facts. Why would drive manufacturers buy the sandforce controller and put it in there fastest drives if it was crap?
Obviously it (it being Sandforce) is not crap. But it is obsolete compared to TRIM. Software controls the hardware. This would explain why TRIM is superior. TRIM is run by the software (smarter), while Sandforce is run by the hardware (dumber).
You need to understand how SSD works and why TRIM is the most important feature of any SSD. First of all, there's no hardware solution to reduce/slow down the performance degradation. The internal garbage collection system that many of the good SSDs have are software based as well. It's the firmware that analyze the data and determine how to clean it but it is never going to be as efficient as TRIM.
I'm not going to go into too deep here, but the hardware can not understand the actual content of the data being fed to it. It only sees binary (1-0) and store it or retrieve it back to the OS. The only way to understand the content of the data is by software analyzing the 0s and 1s and determining the pattern.
One of the biggest problems with SSDs is that when you delete data, the SSD does not know that the data has been deleted and it just write 0000 or whatever, it does not reset the actual NAND cells to empty state.
NAND cells are the fastest when it is reset to empty state meaning there's no 0 or 1 in it. If it has been written 0s-1s, in order to rewrite the data to the NAND cell, the SSD has to read the data first in the cell (is there a 0 or 1 in it, if i'm writing 0 and this cell has 0, no need to rewrite it to 0, move to next cell) and this means it takes twice as long to write data to a used cell. Let's say the data is 0101, the write to 4 empty cells will be done in just 4 writes. If those cells were used, the write will require 4 reads and 2-4 writes.
What TRIM does is that when the OS is aware that a file has been deleted, it'll notify the SSD by sending a short TRIM command to actually wipe out the cells that those files were in, resetting them to empty state with no 0 or 1 in it. That is something that can not be done with the internal garbage collection because SSD itself does not know the difference between deleted file and an empty file that's just full of 0s.
I agreed that it would be awesome if it was all dealt with at a hardware level thing and that was that but it's not
The thing I don't understand is it's not like TRIM has only been around for a week or two and it's not just some random bloke who's coded it.
Many SSDs on the market does not support TRIM either. TRIM is still an immature standard with no universal support among SSDs. It's going to take time to achieve universal support on SSDs. It's a chicken and egg situation here. Software catching up to the hardware and the hardware catching to the software at same time.
We'll get there in time.
What CPU and memory usage? It's a short TRIM command that's sent to the controller when a file has been deleted, it does not even take more than a single clock. It's all done in real time. You will never notice any difference even on the slowest computer on the planet.
TRIM apparently not needed for Mac OSX, My computer specs are similar to when i first got it 4 months ago and I treat my drive like any other normal one. So far, so goof