Is Mac OS X SSD aware?

[fernande-mac]

Consider that this a Solid State Drive (SSD) is basically a flash drive. If you write the same sector over and over again, it can fail after only a year of use. SSD-aware OSs (such as the latest version of SuSe Linux Enterprise) have logic in them to rotate the areas to write on the disk to prevent the "overuse" failure.

I am looking for storage solutions and I am intrigued in using a Solid State Drive (SSD) as my main boot disk. It would be insanely fast.

I know that there are some AirBook configurations that provide SSD as a choice. However, I am not sure if Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard are fully SSD aware and know how to handle the drive correctly to prevent writing failures after long time access.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[danbt79]

You seem to have a bit of a misunderstanding about the way this works. The OS doesn't control where is written to on the drive - that is the drive's on-board controller's responsibility. The OS sends data to the drive, and the drive handles what goes where. This is of course a vast simplification - read anandtech's latest SSD anthology for a great explanation of how SSD's work in relation to HDDs.

Basically, don't worry about it. Any decent SSD will handle wear levelling effectively - an SSD will work perfectly with your Mac - mine does!

 

[deetsnai]

2 things:

1. Apple offers an SSD option on all of their notebooks. I highly doubt they would allow OS X to corrupt these drives within a year.

2. Most of the SSD logic for performance and wear control is in the SSD firmware ( the drive itself).

 

[mkrishnan]

Also, FWIW, generally there's a lot of controversy that there even will be much data loss, even without the sophisticated drive controllers...the netbooks with cheap SSDs that sold in droves in 2007, like mine, are doing just fine two years later -- there hasn't been any data to suggest that the drives have any higher failure rate over the two years than any other kind of drives...

 

[Infrared]

Windows 7 has TRIM support. Does OS X 10.6?

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA
protocol’s Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request
the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted
and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files.

 

[fernande-mac]

Thanks a lot for the very useful information provided.

You bring up a lot of very good points.

Thanks!