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Crucial CT256M4SSD2 trim?
- Thread starter ISKOTB
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Why do you even need to enable it? Crucial's garbage collection routines are working fine for me. 6 months with no TRIM support and performance is unchanged.
Even Crucial will tell you not to enable it.
Even Crucial will tell you not to enable it.
NO!
They do not work fine as your speed decrease overtime.
I don't know where you get the "Performance is unchanged" from, but every site and my experiences are drastically different than your claim.
Crucial support is just like any other tech support, they have no clue what in the world they talking about.
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To OP: Use trim Enabler.
Not mine. Right now, 250 mb/s write, 515 mb/s read. Same as August of 2011 when the Crucial was new.
OP: No need.
Mine says - Disk Speed Test cannot be run og the selected disk because disk is read only
i ran my mbp for about 3 months (with a 256G M4) WITHOUT trim, and am now running with it.
i didn't perceive any slowdowns, and, for that matter, am not seeing any obvious differences in performance 2 months after enabling trim.
not sure it's needed, but enough people have claimed a slowdown without it...
i didn't perceive any slowdowns, and, for that matter, am not seeing any obvious differences in performance 2 months after enabling trim.
not sure it's needed, but enough people have claimed a slowdown without it...
This is my take on this as it has become a touchy topic. I own a lot of M4s and so I have been reading up on this. As of now, there is no conclusion on which is better, as many respectable people have very different views.
The Crucial uses garbage collection that works when the drive is mostly idle. TRIM works as an 'on the fly' cleanup, in that it is active. I believe SandForce drives via Durawrite do this too. Crucial says that the drive's own garbage collection is sufficient, others say it is not. This seems to indicate that enabling TRIM may be determined by who uses their drive how heavily. I have been benchmarking all of my Crucials, including my C300. As of right now, none of them have had any slow downs. Even our original 64 GB Apple SSD in the MBA still runs almost as fast (and has had virtually no size reduction). So at least for what I do with most of my computers, I do not currently need TRIM. On my MBP, I write-rewrite about a GB of data a day, give or take. And so I benchmarked it immediately after install, and have been benching it weekly to look for any signs of slowdowns. It's only been a few weeks on this one though and so I can't say much about it. My MBP sits idle overnight and so I am not expecting a slowdown. Also, I believe you can manually restore the Crucial's functioning if you move a large file, such as a movie, and then delete it. Literature has shown that while you can cause the Crucial's write speeds to slow, once the drive sits idle, it fully recovers.
As of right now, I believe that the Crucial's garbage collection is sufficient. Some people go as far to say that it is not only sufficient for non-TRIM OS', but actually ideal. As we know, the Crucial has a Marvell controller in it. Some writers have stated the Marvell to be the best for non-TRIM environments (even better than the Sandforce ones) as they claim the Marvell was designed with the assumption that TRIM would NOT be available where as other controllers were designed with the assumption that TRIM would be available and always utilized.
see: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...iews/45718-crucial-m4-256gb-ssd-review-2.html
In non-TRIM environment testing, the M4 does very well. In fact, it spanks the Sandforce drives, which may explain why my M4 seems to do a bit better in the real world than my SF ones for running OS X.
see: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...ews/45718-crucial-m4-256gb-ssd-review-12.html
So what does that mean to users? My take is that some users may need active garbage collection if they continually move data about and have few or no periods of inactivity for the drive to cover. My take is also that most users should be okay without TRIM. While it seems safe to enable TRIM for the most part, I have read a few reports of bad things happening when doing so. Because of all of this, I personally am not going to consider enabling TRIM unless I see a slowdown of the drive. If that slowdown never comes, I personally do not see a need for it at this PIT. However, your needs may vary.
Finally, if we want more conclusive evidence, we could get data from RAIDed systems using Marvell controllers because IIRC TRIM can't be used in a RAID config. IIRC some of the Intels are Marvell. If the X25M is a Marvell controller, then this data may exist as that seems to be the common SSD used at the enterprise level currently.
The Crucial uses garbage collection that works when the drive is mostly idle. TRIM works as an 'on the fly' cleanup, in that it is active. I believe SandForce drives via Durawrite do this too. Crucial says that the drive's own garbage collection is sufficient, others say it is not. This seems to indicate that enabling TRIM may be determined by who uses their drive how heavily. I have been benchmarking all of my Crucials, including my C300. As of right now, none of them have had any slow downs. Even our original 64 GB Apple SSD in the MBA still runs almost as fast (and has had virtually no size reduction). So at least for what I do with most of my computers, I do not currently need TRIM. On my MBP, I write-rewrite about a GB of data a day, give or take. And so I benchmarked it immediately after install, and have been benching it weekly to look for any signs of slowdowns. It's only been a few weeks on this one though and so I can't say much about it. My MBP sits idle overnight and so I am not expecting a slowdown. Also, I believe you can manually restore the Crucial's functioning if you move a large file, such as a movie, and then delete it. Literature has shown that while you can cause the Crucial's write speeds to slow, once the drive sits idle, it fully recovers.
As of right now, I believe that the Crucial's garbage collection is sufficient. Some people go as far to say that it is not only sufficient for non-TRIM OS', but actually ideal. As we know, the Crucial has a Marvell controller in it. Some writers have stated the Marvell to be the best for non-TRIM environments (even better than the Sandforce ones) as they claim the Marvell was designed with the assumption that TRIM would NOT be available where as other controllers were designed with the assumption that TRIM would be available and always utilized.
see: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...iews/45718-crucial-m4-256gb-ssd-review-2.html
In non-TRIM environment testing, the M4 does very well. In fact, it spanks the Sandforce drives, which may explain why my M4 seems to do a bit better in the real world than my SF ones for running OS X.
see: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...ews/45718-crucial-m4-256gb-ssd-review-12.html
So what does that mean to users? My take is that some users may need active garbage collection if they continually move data about and have few or no periods of inactivity for the drive to cover. My take is also that most users should be okay without TRIM. While it seems safe to enable TRIM for the most part, I have read a few reports of bad things happening when doing so. Because of all of this, I personally am not going to consider enabling TRIM unless I see a slowdown of the drive. If that slowdown never comes, I personally do not see a need for it at this PIT. However, your needs may vary.
Finally, if we want more conclusive evidence, we could get data from RAIDed systems using Marvell controllers because IIRC TRIM can't be used in a RAID config. IIRC some of the Intels are Marvell. If the X25M is a Marvell controller, then this data may exist as that seems to be the common SSD used at the enterprise level currently.
Excellent info Nick and I completely agree with everything you said. The HW Canucks test you linked provides some good data on the whole TRIM issue.
That is indeed excellent info! I just installed my m4 and I've been watching to see if I should enable trim. I typically only power on my MBP in the evening, use it for a few hours, and shut it down. Maybe once a week I should leave it plugged in and on so it has some time to do this garbage collection. Thanks!
My question, and the reason I enabled TRIM on my Corsair Sandforce drive, was the GC while idling statements. Some manufacturers state for the GC to work best the system must be on and the user logged out. Nobody could say if that is how it works truly or not. Since I never log out or shut down, I wanted a more active approach and enabled TRIM. I haven't noticed any speed change for enabled or disabled.
Thanks! I was hoping you would jump into this thread to get your thoughts on this. This is a very odd topic in the sense that some people say the M4 is the worst drive for a non-TRIM OS and have presented good reasons why, while others, such as the HW Canucks, present evidence that it is not only the best but the best by a really wide margin. Both sides have made some pretty good arguments and both may be right as it seems to depend on how much data and what type of data the user uses. I personally always figured that SandForce's active cleanup was better but after reading about how the idle GC recovers without issues, I've started to question my own assumptions. As it stands now, none of my Crucial M4s or my C300 have had any performance drops so, my real world experience has indicated that the M4 is a great pick for OS X with or without TRIM. Additionally, my real world experience has resulted in the Crucial actually (slightly) outperforming my SandForce drives with the work I do. So who knows!?!?