Intel 520 Series 120GB SSD, enable TRIM?

[JuanKB]

Here it is, another question regarding modern SSDs and TRIM. I've read several threads in this forum regarding this topic, as well as other forums and Anandtech's reviews, but I'm still confused. Opinions and facts seem to differ.

I've recently bought and installed an Intel 520 Series 120GB in my MacBook Pro 7,1 (13'', Mid-2010). It was up and running in no time and works flawlessly and amazingly fast, btw. The question is whether I should enable TRIM or not. Some opinions say yes, It's useful to manage deleted files and help the SSD not to lose speed. Some others say no, most modern SSDs have their own garbage collection which is perfectly capable of doing that by itself. So it's a draw. Maybe it doesn't make a big difference, but I seek for you advice as I am now clueless.

Thank you and greetings form Spain .

EDIT.: Btw, I use Lion (10.7.3).

 

[lamboman]

My advice is that unless you are doing tons and tons of big rewrites to the drive every day (almost using the drive as some manual cache for huge files), you won't need TRIM.

Sandforce drives also have excellent garbage collection capabilities, so you really shouldn't need it.

 

[dusk007]

Just try it.
Benchmark now. Use it for a couple of months. Benchmark again and see if it is worse.
If it is much worse enable trim and do a delete all empty space run. If that returns performance I would stick with trim.

Different SSD behave differently. And some show bugs. In doubt I would use Trim but just test it.
The difference in Speed between an untrimmed and trimmed drive takes quite a while to grow but you probably won't notice a difference unless you benchmark after at least 2 months use.

 

[JuanKB]

Thank you for your answers .

If I were to enable TRIM, would it handle the previous data writes? Or does it only fix the writes done after enabling it?

 

[Ccrew]

Thank you for your answers .

If I were to enable TRIM, would it handle the previous data writes? Or does it only fix the writes done after enabling it?

if you follow the procedure dusk007 gave you with clearing the free space after enabling, it would clean up the drive completely, not just what was current.

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Thank you for your answers .

If I were to enable TRIM, would it handle the previous data writes? Or does it only fix the writes done after enabling it?

if you follow the procedure dusk007 gave you with clearing the free space after enabling, it would clean up the drive completely, not just what was current. Even without the free space clear it would, albeit it would take some time.

 

[AppChat]

how do you enable trim in the first palce? lol

 

[Weaselboy]

Just try it.
Benchmark now. Use it for a couple of months. Benchmark again and see if it is worse.
If it is much worse enable trim and do a delete all empty space run. If that returns performance I would stick with trim.

If you want to TRIM the drive after enabling the TRIM hack, you need to boot into safe mode then run the command "fsck -fy" (without the quotes). This will TRIM all free space on the drive. Much faster and less wear on the drive than running erase free space from Disk Utility.

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how do you enable trim in the first palce? lol

http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

 

[michalzuber]

I enabled TRIM with Trim Enabler from http://www.groths.org/trim-enabler/
after restart TRIM support went to "Yes"

http://i.imgur.com/0J2dV6L.png?1