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Has anyone with an SSD in their MBP noticed any appreciable degradation?

D

deus ex machina

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 28, 2010
155
0
Simple enough question. From my reading, it would seem that OSX is less prone to having such an issue, even without TRIM. What have you folks witnessed.

So far my Samsung drive is running every bit as fast as it did 3 months ago.

Thank you for your postings, assuaging my curiosity.
 
deus ex machina said:
Simple enough question. From my reading, it would seem that OSX is less prone to having such an issue, even without TRIM. What have you folks witnessed.

So far my Samsung drive is running every bit as fast as it did 3 months ago.

Thank you for your postings, assuaging my curiosity.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting. I'm curious about this also. Is your drive an Apple-installed SSD? Did you every fill it all up? How much is the free space now?

I have a 128GB Apple SSD. I used about 1/3 of the drive space. Although it's still as fast as it was at the beginning, it's still too early to say anything about the degradation since I have my machine only 1 month.
 
I installed my Kingston V+ series 128GB SSD 5 months ago. I conduct both Geekbench and XBench benchmarks on a monthly basis to see if there is any degradation. XBench isn't the most reliable, but works to give me general data numbers, but as you can see there has been no degradation and I currently only have 28GB available and have written well over a Terabyte of data to this drive. I use this drive just like any other HDD.

XBench results from May:

Results 207.28
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.4 (10F569)
Physical RAM 6144 MB
Model MacBookPro7,1
Drive Type KINGSTON SNVP325S2128GB
CPU Test 189.12
GCD Loop 311.22 16.41 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 153.23 3.64 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 124.04 4.09 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 298.61 52.00 Mops/sec
Thread Test 316.54
Disk Test 235.53
Sequential 159.39
Uncached Write 271.62 166.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 278.34 157.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 67.30 19.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 337.43 169.59 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 451.00
Uncached Write 245.76 26.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 424.90 136.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1191.18 8.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 622.17 115.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]


And from today:

Results 208.82
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.4 (10F569)
Physical RAM 6144 MB
Model MacBookPro7,1
Drive Type KINGSTON SNVP325S2128GB
CPU Test 187.53
GCD Loop 311.73 16.43 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 151.10 3.59 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 122.60 4.04 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 298.75 52.02 Mops/sec
Thread Test 350.39
Disk Test 230.50
Sequential 155.00
Uncached Write 288.97 177.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 275.00 155.60 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 66.73 19.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 268.47 134.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 449.45
Uncached Write 242.10 25.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 422.60 135.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1213.38 8.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 633.46 117.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 
And Geekbench from May:

Summary

Section Description Score Geekbench Score 3689
Geekbench 2.1.6 for Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Integer Processor integer performance 3004
Floating Point Processor floating point performance 5424
Memory Memory performance 2744
Stream Memory bandwidth performance 1908

And Geekbench from today:

Section Description Score Geekbench Score 3657
Geekbench 2.1.6 for Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Integer Processor integer performance 3023
Floating Point Processor floating point performance 5402
Memory Memory performance 2718
Stream Memory bandwidth performance 1648
 
highADP said:
Thanks for posting. I'm curious about this also. Is your drive an Apple-installed SSD? Did you every fill it all up? How much is the free space now?

I have a 128GB Apple SSD. I used about 1/3 of the drive space. Although it's still as fast as it was at the beginning, it's still too early to say anything about the degradation since I have my machine only 1 month.
Click to expand...

I purchased my from eBay (256GB Samsung). At one point, it was over 90% full (It is under 40% ATM), but I have yet to see a performance drop.

namaste,
david
 
I've been using a Samsung 256GB for a few months now & I don't notice any difference in speed. :)
 
How about from those who have mixed SSD with regular platters? I've heard that sometimes causes slowdowns. Has that been the case with anyone?
 
I personally have a 128ssd from apple that i have only had for a month or so. But my friend has had his 256ssd from apple for about a year and a half. Back when the 256ssd was a 900 dollar option. He hasn't seen any slow down with. Overall its slower then mine, only about half the speed but overall still way quicker then a conventional drive.
 
i've had an INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC for about 14 months and have noticed no major degrade in performance.

The drives are well worth the money in my opinion.
 
Perdification said:
TRIM or no TRIM seems like it isn't making any difference then...
Click to expand...

Interesting...most PC tech sites and magazines I read decry OS X's lack of TRIM in every review of SSDs, basically "lulz no TRIM in MAC osx enjoy ur dead drive Macf*gs!" :rolleyes:

I'm interested to know if OS X has...erm...other forms of optimisation that may work just as well? I'll admit to not knowing much about how TRIM works or even what it is. :confused: All I know is that having TRIM supposedly = good, and having no TRIM supposedly = dead drive after a certain amount of months.
 
Hey, didn't want to start a new thread: assuming you go dual boot W7 and 10.6....now as far as I know W7 supports TRIM, so is it possible to just boot into W7 and perform TRIM command on that partition? Although based on these results, TRIM is quite pointless.
 
Lambros said:
Hey, didn't want to start a new thread: assuming you go dual boot W7 and 10.6....now as far as I know W7 supports TRIM, so is it possible to just boot into W7 and perform TRIM command on that partition? Although based on these results, TRIM is quite pointless.
Click to expand...

It is possible if you've got Windows 7 and OS X on two separate drives and even then you'd have to erase your SSD, format it into NTFS and then run the appropriate tools. After that you can then clone your OS X system back on the SSD and you're good to go.

Worthless effort if you've got an Intel or Sandforce SSD. I've got the Intel G2 160GB in my Mac Pro for a year now and it hasn't degraded at all (benched the drive recently).
 
It appears that OSX has some sort of built in TRIM feature to prevent drive degradation. The proof is hear in this very thread.

Windows needs TRIM, because it isn't what you would call the greatest of OS's. I only use Windows when I am forced to and with Microsoft office 2011 about to come out, I will have even less need to use my bootcamp partition.
 
Covart said:
It appears that OSX has some sort of built in TRIM feature to prevent drive degradation. The proof is hear in this very thread.
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as TRIM or anything like that in OS X.

The reason why several people don't experience degradation depends on the kind of drives they use, and of course their usage.

"Old" SSDs, such like the OCZ Vertex (based on the Indilinx controller) degrade quite noticeable, even on OS X. I've got such a drive in my MBP and after a year of usage it isn't as fast as it was on the first day.
 
Transporteur said:
There is no such thing as TRIM or anything like that in OS X.
Click to expand...
No kidding. I didn't say there was. There is some sort of garbage collection built into OSX though. Call it whatever you want, but those of us that buy quality SSD's don't seem to have any issues.

I have proven in this very thread over 5 months to have no degradation in my Kingston V+ series SSD. And I have written and deleted data off of it more than most people do in a year on a regular HDD. Just in the last week 100GB of data has been written onto the drive, moved to my HDD and then deleted from the SSD. I do this at least a couple times a month.

I guess when you buy quality, TRIM isn't needed. OSX takes care of my SSD just fine.
 
Terminal.app said:
Interesting...most PC tech sites and magazines I read decry OS X's lack of TRIM in every review of SSDs, basically "lulz no TRIM in MAC osx enjoy ur dead drive Macf*gs!" :rolleyes:

I'm interested to know if OS X has...erm...other forms of optimisation that may work just as well? I'll admit to not knowing much about how TRIM works or even what it is. :confused: All I know is that having TRIM supposedly = good, and having no TRIM supposedly = dead drive after a certain amount of months.
Click to expand...

Probably apple has their own way to manage SSDs, but its not stated. If apple bothered to include SSDs officially as an upgrade option, then I guess they might have done something about it. I'm not too sure about this though.
 
Transporteur said:
There is no such thing as TRIM or anything like that in OS X.

The reason why several people don't experience degradation depends on the kind of drives they use, and of course their usage.

"Old" SSDs, such like the OCZ Vertex (based on the Indilinx controller) degrade quite noticeable, even on OS X. I've got such a drive in my MBP and after a year of usage it isn't as fast as it was on the first day.
Click to expand...

A Windows box would see serious degradation within months using to Indilinx controlled drives.
OSX seems be kinder to SSD, perhaps it is the secure erase feature or the manner in with it places data over the drive.
 
Probably the performance doesn't degrade and drop, but the lifespan of it suffers? Has anyone had a dead SSD yet? I heard they have a lifespan of 5 years if you use it properly, for intel ones at least.
 
Perdification said:
Probably the performance doesn't degrade and drop, but the lifespan of it suffers? Has anyone had a dead SSD yet? I heard they have a lifespan of 5 years if you use it properly, for intel ones at least.
Click to expand...

The "cells" within the SSD has a lifespan of about 10,000 writes.
 
Had a Crucial C300 running in my MBP since mid-March and there's no obvious slowdown. 75% full, rewriting several gigs per day.
 
I have been running an OCZ Mac Edition 250 GB SSD since Feb (8 months) with no degradation at all. I use XBench once a month or so just to make sure, and the numbers are always consistent.

As for TRIM, there have been a lot of discussions on this in other threads here. I will say this, the understanding I took away on the whole thing was that a) OSX has efficiences built into it which help prevent disk fragmentation and, b) most of the better quality SSD's have logic built in to prevent fragmentation. The net result... I don't worry about TRIM or fragmentation. Those of us posting with SSD's have proven that with our consistent performance.

As for wear life --- OMG --- what if my main memory wears out!! Holy crap, my RAM could go bad... to me the whole drive "life" discussion is not valuable. I know for a fact, without needing evidence, that my SSD will long outlive any platter based hard drive. So again... I just don't worry about it like I don't worry about my RAM waring out.
 
JasonH42 said:
Had a Crucial C300 running in my MBP since mid-March and there's no obvious slowdown. 75% full, rewriting several gigs per day.
Click to expand...

Crucial C300? Isn't it a SATA III drive? Are there any improvements over normal ones at this point in time?
 
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