I was wondering if anybody did clean install of lion with their SSD? Also, did you do a secure erase or not? If not, has it noticeably affected the performance of your hard drive or does the TRIM function in Lion negate the need to do a secure erase and just let you clean install as normal? I am asking because I have an Apple SSD and wanted to do a clean install of lion, but not if it affects the performance of the SSD. Also, does Lion allow users to do a secure erase on their Apple SSD?
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Has anybody performed a clean install with an SSD?
- Thread starter miamirulz29
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I did a clean install of Lion on my MBP w/ Vertex 3.
TRIM is not enabled, I did not secure erase, just formatted the drive.
The Vertex 3 (Sandforce based) has pretty aggressive garbage collection, so it should be fine. And I notice no decrease in performance.
For you and your Apple SSD, I dont how well their GC is, if it even has any. But Lion should enable TRIM by default once installed with Apple SSDs, and that will clean up and maintain the health and performance of your SSD automatically.
TRIM is not enabled, I did not secure erase, just formatted the drive.
The Vertex 3 (Sandforce based) has pretty aggressive garbage collection, so it should be fine. And I notice no decrease in performance.
For you and your Apple SSD, I dont how well their GC is, if it even has any. But Lion should enable TRIM by default once installed with Apple SSDs, and that will clean up and maintain the health and performance of your SSD automatically.
I did a fresh install on a brand new OWC SSD drive. Just created a partition and installed. I thought Lion was going to enable TRIM for third party drives, but it's still disabled. Although apparently it's not required.
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I did a clean install on an intel x-25m. I did not do a secure erase, just a normal erase. Everything seemed fine then I used trim enabler and saw a definite performance increase so I would say since you have an Apple SSD a secure erase is not required. Trim will handle everything.
Thanks for the replies guys. Has anybody with an apple SSD performed a clean install? Also, does Lion allow users to do a secure erase on an SSD?
I don't think you would even want to do a secure erase on an ssd for performance gains. From what I have read, secure erase WRITES to the whole drive to cover up old data, and writing to an ssd is the exact opposite of what you want. And my VERY limited understanding of TRIM is that is "unwrites" to "deleted" parts of the drives.
*Please don't flame me if I am completely wrong here...
SSD uses flash memory....there is absolutely no reason to write to 0 since there is no persistence of memory! It is an electrical format....not magnetic. Format, and install. That is all you need.
I can't tell if you are agreeing with me or not, but I feel like we are on the same page... lol
I'm pretty sure that's NOT correct.
If there were no persistence of memory, then it wouldn't store any information when it wasn't running off power. E.g. if your laptop's battery dies, so does your information... kind of like the old Palm Pilot with 2 megs of memory that I used to have. Data would be lost if battery completely died.
That's NOT what an SSD is though.
Can we get back on topic please. Secure erasing an SSD does not write 0's in every block, instead it marks each block as empty so the drive performs optimally. Formatting the drive puts 0's and slows down the SSD. I just want to know if Lion allows users to secure erase an Apple SSD and what the performance effects are of doing a clean install on an ssd when upgrading to Lion.