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Mac OS X 10.10.4 Supports TRIM for Third-Party SSD Hard Drives

alvindarkness said:
Trim in OSX has caused beach balling on a bunch of my old Vertex drives. One of mine did it back in the Mountin Lion days from memory. My way around it was to simply run with trim support off, and then every few months boot into a backup osx installation on a usb stick with trim enabled, run fsck -ffy on the primary boot drive, to trim it completely, and then booting back into the real osx install. Not elegent, but provides the a full trim every now and again for peace of mind and avoids beach balls.
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you can throw your vertex drives to the trash can, with or without trim. or better, ask for a warranty refund. i got mine from my old vertex2.
 
JustThinkin' said:
After reading through some of the Linux-related threads, I suspect the situation is this:

Both the hardware and software manufacturers are looking out for us more than we realize. Probably many SSDs have had a few TRIM-related bugs. But Microsoft has made up for them so the end-user (and they!) don't suffer. And SSD manufacturers have also made adjustments so they work smoothly, even when they don't fully support every single command.


My suspicion is that Apple's tested many of the major SSD brands/models, without telling us. I'd be most concerned about using old or obscure brands or models. Popular models from the last few years are probably safe.



Addendum:
The prejudice is that hardware manufacturers only care about Windows. But the big ones usually test for OS X too - especially if they know Apple customers use their product. Yet for non-enterprise products, I imagine they avoid Linux testing, for a few reasons: 1) The consumer market is so small, 2) Linux is so fragmented (which complicates testing), and 3) Linux developers are so diligent about squashing bugs themselves.
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probably safe = probably = not safe, at all.
 
Perhaps I'm being overly cautious but running Crucials on externals and some internals, with GC, I fail to see the right risk/reward benefit by activating TRIM. As long as there's a decent amount of space on the drive, I'm not going to see a performance increase. Data corruption, on the other hand, is a major issue. Perhaps I save the job of booting into Recovery mode and letting the Mac's sit there overnight, don't even know if this can/should be avoided.

I'd suggest anyone considering this move to read the Ars article from to back. Then decided if it's worth it. Having people say they have no issues suggests they know when they have data loss. Reality here is the odds are I would not know it until well after my backups have been written over. If ever. Who knows what files are affected and when was the last time they were accessed?
 
Lolito said:
probably safe = probably = not safe, at all.
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I'm sure you're smart enough to read the post by Temptin, right above mine (which I didn't see before I started composing mine). It states the situation much better than I could. It's safe.

By your definition, nothing in this world's safe, so we might as well discard the word. Warped viewpoint.
 
JustThinkin' said:
I'm sure you're smart enough to read the post by Temptin, right above mine (which I didn't see before I started composing mine). It states the situation much better than I could. It's safe.

By your definition, nothing in this world's safe, so we might as well discard the word. Warped viewpoint.
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For those that think in a binary mode, you are correct. Fortunately, most of us can see the grey areas and negotiate them just fine.
 
Ray2 said:
For those that think in a binary mode, you are correct. Fortunately, most of us can see the grey areas and negotiate them just fine.
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Binary requires making a decision, that past a certain voltage level it's true, not false.

The voltage level need not be precise, but the decision can be clear. In other words, the voltage levels are tainted. But a decision can still be made. And there's a threshold that's considered safe.


I find it ironic that the answer to your objection lies in the very technology we're discussing here. If such determinations hadn't been made years ago, we wouldn't even have this digital technology now. There will of course be a few people who experience failure or problems (as always), but (under the stated conditions, naturally) it's fair to deem it safe at this point.
 
Crucial m550 updated to MU02 firmware on a 2011 MBP, did trimforce last night and just tested now — back up to speeds I haven't seen for quite a while on this disk — 475MB write/500MB read, whereas last I checked it was in the upper 300's somewhere I think. At one point a while back it was wayyyyy super slow, and I cleared up a little space and booted in safe mode or had left it on the login screen overnight as someone suggested to get garbage collection to do its thing (drive needs to be idle), and that had brought things back up closer to regular speeds, but not like this.

I keep a bootable backup but thinking about setting up a Time Machine backup drive on my network for redundancy, just in case... which isn't a bad idea anyway.
 
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fastasleep said:
Crucial m550 updated to MU02 firmware on a 2011 MBP, did trimforce last night and just tested now — back up to speeds I haven't seen for quite a while on this disk — 475MB write/500MB read, whereas last I checked it was in the upper 300's somewhere I think. At one point a while back it was wayyyyy super slow, and I cleared up a little space and booted in safe mode or had left it on the login screen overnight as someone suggested to get garbage collection to do its thing (drive needs to be idle), and that had brought things back up closer to regular speeds, but not like this.

I keep a bootable backup but thinking about setting up a Time Machine backup drive on my network for redundancy, just in case... which isn't a bad idea anyway.
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I haven't done any drive testing, but I think my Crucial M4 seems a bunch faster on my mid-2009 13" MBP after enabling TRIM! Pretty nifty.

EDIT: I'm getting around 200MB write and ~ 250MB read. My computer doesn't support the faster internal drive speeds, unfortunately so that's probably about as fast as it's ever gonna get.

Tuck
 
theosib said:
Any good SSD has enough overprovisioning that TRIM shouldn't make much of a speed difference. Plus, my root partition is so close to full, it REALLY wouldn't make any difference (TRIM's performance impact increases with the amount of free space in your file system).
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Well, Tom’s hardware test of SSDs (2012 I must admit) does not seem to agree with you:
TRIM-test.png
 
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On my 2011 iMac I have installed the Apple OEM SSD. I noticed that after the 10.10.4 update, in system report, storage, it no longer shows the "trim enabled" field. It also seems that Apple is always enabling trim on Apple OEM SDD even if "sudo trim force disable" is used. At first, I was confused not seeing the "trim enabled" field in system report. I had to boot into single user mode and issue "fsck -fy" to confirm that trim was still enabled after 10.10.4 update.
 
Ledgem said:
Someone over at Ars Technica posted a warning about using TRIM with certain hard drives. I'll quote it here:


I haven't looked into it too heavily and I know that plenty of people use TRIM with these drives with no issues (I did in the past), but given that I use a Samsung 840, it gives me pause about enabling this feature. Just figured I'd put it out there for everyone else to see.
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I use a Samsung 830 and have done for a while now, I have always had TRIM enabled by that little app you can get, but I have now removed it and will use this trick.
And so far as I know, Apple themselves used Samsung 2.5" SSD drives as build to order options, just rebranded as Apple drives with TRIM support set automatically in OSX.

But I will of course use Time Machine to be safe.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Well it's up to the user to do his own research when installing new hardware, especially non-Apple add-ons and if he/she isn't technically inclined, he/she probably won't be upgrading to SSDs anyway. If he/she installs an Apple PCIe SSD, it will work OOTB with no user intervention. If he/she installs 3rd party he should already know about the related nuances through his/her research. If not, nothing will be noticed until performance degradation sets in (if ever). At that point I'd guess he/she will look for a solution and find out about the trimforce command.
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hmm...eventually they will found out...with someone's help.
 
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I have a Crucial MX100 which is listed in the linux code as having an issue with Trim.

I checked Crucial's firmware update page, and they have issued a firmware update a few months ago, from MUO1 to MUO2, and one of the improvements is listed as:
  • Corrected error handling NCQ Trim Commands
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-ssd-firmware

So I'm updating to this SSD firmware before enabling trim on my Crucial SSD - if you also have a Crucial SSD, it's worth checking your firmware and seeing if there is a more recent version that fixes trim handling before enabling trim.
 
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Skim reading through this forum and others, I can't see anyone who actually has reported any issues after running Trimforce!? Has anyone actually lost any data or had noticeable issues thus far?
 
scrmtrey said:
Thats ********. Ive got trim enabled on two 850 ssd and its all good. Also my friends got trim enabled via trimforce, everything is good.
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Also, the article b0fh is linking to is about the 840 PRO and 850 PRO, not about the EVO drives (which I presume most of us use because of the lower price tag). Those are totally different drives.
 
sdz said:
This is just does not make any sense. This company should go out of business. My 400$ lost on a owc SSD. Living in Germany, they wanted me to send their piece of junk back for analysis. SMART Status was just "dead" and OS X slow as hell. Any Disk I/O took ages. They are expensive, they didn't support TRIM.

GC and TRIM are not the same things. Every SSD has a GC Controller. They advertise it like its their invention.

DONT BUY OWC STUFF.
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OWC is one of the best known in the business. As someone that makes data recovery and drive utilities, I can tell you that their drives have a far lower failure rate than most of the other big names.
 
so far it's impressive. I used the trimeforce command on my crucial m500 and then booted in single mode to complete the job with fsck -fy and the result is imposing.

yesterday, the aja system test with 16 gb files size took ages to complete and went down to 20 mb/s, and today it stays at 325 all the way. nice.
 
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OK, I am a bit clueless on all this, so do forgive if this is a naive question. I have a crucial SSD installed in the CD bay of my 2011 MacBoom Pro (m550). I have been using Trim Enabler 3.3 to this point. Is there any improvement to be gained from switching now over to the Apple Trimforce function? Note: I just updated to 10.10.4 and the Terminal command listed here does not seem to work. It returns "function not found"... Is it possible some versions of these SSDs are not recognized by Trimforce?
 
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