Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

OS X El Capitan Opens Door to TRIM Support on Third-Party SSDs for Improved Performance

Hello,
I have a Macbook Pro Mid2012 with a Samsung EVO 840 1TB, having the latest firmware. I never installed a third party utility to enable trim.
Yesterday I updated to Yosemite 10.10.4 and I can see the trimforce command on the terminal.
Is it safe to enable trim? I have time machine backups but I dont want to risk a system failure. If something goes wrong will I be able to reinstall at least as my time machine backups dont have trim setting enabled?
What happens if i install bootcamp? Will trim have any impact on the Windows partition?
 
cghera said:
Hello,
I have a Macbook Pro Mid2012 with a Samsung EVO 840 1TB, having the latest firmware. I never installed a third party utility to enable trim.
Yesterday I updated to Yosemite 10.10.4 and I can see the trimforce command on the terminal.
Is it safe to enable trim? I have time machine backups but I dont want to risk a system failure. If something goes wrong will I be able to reinstall at least as my time machine backups dont have trim setting enabled?
What happens if i install bootcamp? Will trim have any impact on the Windows partition?
Click to expand...
From user reports so far, it appears to be safe to enable the trimforce command. If you want to turn it off you just run it again with disable at the end.

If things go badly, you can always option key boot to the TM disk and restore.

OS X TRIM will not impact the Bootcamp partition.
 
Temptin said:
Edit: This post has a lot of visibility, so I'd also like to point your attention to an earlier post of mine which gives you safe TRIM in Yosemite 10.10.3 and up:



The following is the original post from before the edit, and has nothing to do with the above edit:

----------------------------------------------------

Geez... there's a lot of combined issues in that article...

The first issue is the queued TRIM implementation in Linux. It is the only operating system that tries to send FPDMA QUEUED TRIM (a new SATA II extension of NCQ, and therefore also called NCQ TRIM). The latest Samsung firmwares mistakenly set word 77 bit 6 to 1 in the ATA IDENTIFY flags, which tells the OS that they support FPDMA QUEUED operations, when they actually don't. If you try to send a FPDMA QUEUED TRIM, the latest Samsung drives spectacularly overwrite random data with zeroes. The Linux kernel now blacklists those drives from trying to use FPDMA QUEUED TRIM, since they're misbehaving with that command. The Samsung engineers are aware of it since the issue first surfaced a year ago, but a fix is not yet ready.
Click to expand...

I see you have abandoned your account but maybe I get lucky so I'd liek to ask if samsungs 850 EVO ssds would fall under the "safe for TRIM" category!

Also, on what forum are you active, Mr Temptin?
 
I'm wondering if its safe to uninstall trim enabler 3.4.2, now that I have the current sudo trim enabled. Seems a waste to have trim enabler turned off but still sitting in my applications folder.
 
allanfries said:
I'm wondering if its safe to uninstall trim enabler 3.4.2, now that I have the current sudo trim enabled. Seems a waste to have trim enabler turned off but still sitting in my applications folder.
Click to expand...
I see no reason to keep it now that the you can enable TRIM from the native OS command line.
 
Weaselboy said:
I see no reason to keep it now that the you can enable TRIM from the native OS command line.
Click to expand...


Yeah, agreed. It does confirm that trim is working on my MBp tho.

Trim.jpg
 
  • Like
Reactions: John.B
allanfries said:
Yeah I just uninstalled it. Was doing some fall drive cleaning and said "what the f**k!"
Click to expand...
I also deleted that app after uninstalling and using the "sudo trimforce enable" command. However, I noticed some prefence files remaining, do a search with EasyFind, etc. searching for "cindori", which should tell you where they are.
 
davidlv said:
I also deleted that app after uninstalling and using the "sudo trimforce enable" command. However, I noticed some prefence files remaining, do a search with EasyFind, etc. searching for "cindori", which should tell you where they are.
Click to expand...

I actually used app cleaner to remove it, so maybe it got them all. Will check anyhow.
 
As I do not have a SSD yet for my mini late 2012 my question is simple. Are Samsung 8 and Crucial a no go? Which brand should I buy? OCZ? Toshiba? I heard intel uses a sandforce controller which I oughtn't buy?
 
magbarn said:
The problem with that 'fix' is that the drive is wearing out much faster than it should as it shouldn't have to 'move around' i.e. re-write so often to keep the data 'fresh' so the drive doesn't slow down. I guess since SSD's have come down in price so much in the last year, I just dumped my 840 Evo's on ebay buyers who either don't know or don't care about this defect.
Click to expand...
true which brand do you recommend?
 
grandM said:
As I do not have a SSD yet for my mini late 2012 my question is simple. Are Samsung 8 and Crucial a no go? Which brand should I buy? OCZ? Toshiba? I heard intel uses a sandforce controller which I oughtn't buy?
Click to expand...

Nothing at all wrong with either Samsung or Crucial's current models. Intel uses a SF controller on some of their drives and their own Intel controller on others.
 
Weaselboy said:
Nothing at all wrong with either Samsung or Crucial's current models. Intel uses a SF controller on some of their drives and their own Intel controller on others.
Click to expand...
I did read on some sites data will be lost. This loss would occur slowly so saying it works now is no guarantee. I quote "It's wrong. All affected drives will experience data loss. How long that will take is another question. The more trim commands that are sent, the greater the loss will be, and the earlier it will arrive. As has been pointed out in several technical forums, most people will experience random data loss, or errors, that they will incorrectly ascribe to other reasons, such as a malfunctioning drive, either software or hardware. Disk Utility and Diskwarrier will fix some of those problems" at http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/18...pport-for-aftermarket-ssds-in-os-x-10-10-4/40

I would like to avoid this possibility. What is bad at the sandforce controller? Is Intel the safe solution or are other SSD drives resistant to this bug? For Intel is darned pricy. I also read SSD drives are supposed to only last 5 years (http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/460241-tested-intels-730-series-ssd/)?
 
Last edited:
grandM said:
I did read on some sites data will be lost. This loss would occur slowly so saying it works now is no guarantee. I quote "It's wrong. All affected drives will experience data loss. How long that will take is another question. The more trim commands that are sent, the greater the loss will be, and the earlier it will arrive. As has been pointed out in several technical forums, most people will experience random data loss, or errors, that they will incorrectly ascribe to other reasons, such as a malfunctioning drive, either software or hardware. Disk Utility and Diskwarrier will fix some of those problems"
Click to expand...
The post on Appleinsider is outdated. The TRIM problems with Samsung drives were specific to Linux and due to a bug in the Linux kernel. The link below has information about it.
https://blog.algolia.com/when-solid-state-drives-are-not-that-solid/
 
  • Like
Reactions: crjackson2134, Weaselboy and DCIFRTHS
grandM said:
I did read on some sites data will be lost. This loss would occur slowly so saying it works now is no guarantee. I quote "It's wrong. All affected drives will experience data loss. How long that will take is another question. The more trim commands that are sent, the greater the loss will be, and the earlier it will arrive. As has been pointed out in several technical forums, most people will experience random data loss, or errors, that they will incorrectly ascribe to other reasons, such as a malfunctioning drive, either software or hardware. Disk Utility and Diskwarrier will fix some of those problems" at http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/18...pport-for-aftermarket-ssds-in-os-x-10-10-4/40

I would like to avoid this possibility. What is bad at the sandforce controller? Is Intel the safe solution or are other SSD drives resistant to this bug? For Intel is darned pricy. I also read SSD drives are supposed to only last 5 years (http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/460241-tested-intels-730-series-ssd/)?
Click to expand...

Like chrfr explained, that was a bug in the Linux kernel and has nothing to do with the drives or with OS X. It is a non-issue.

I'm just not a fan of Sandforce controllers because they have poor write speeds with incompressible data.

I'm not seeing where you get five years from that article. The warranty on that Intel drive is five years.... is that what you mean?

Any drive you buy today will likely outlast your computer. Give this a read.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: JamesPDX and crjackson2134
RosynaKeller said:
The dataloss problem is very real. Some SSDs known to have data corruption bugs when TRIM is enabled are Crucial SSDs and The Samsung 840 family of SSDs.

Other SSDs have very significant bugs in their firmware when TRIM is enabled that do not result in immediate data loss. For example, a common bug is every TRIM command causing an immediate GC pass. This harms performance and leads to write amplification, a situation which reduces the life of SSDs. And even if a GC pass is not triggered, if the TRIM command is used haphazardly, it cause cause performance issues on SSDs made before 2012 as the command queue had to be emptied before TRIM could be used.

And the worse part is that even if these firmware bugs are fixed, vendors don't usually release Firmware updaters for Mac OS X.

The good news is that the far majority of USB and Thunderbolt enclosures do not forward TRIM commands to the drives.

(It's also important to note that TRIM cannot improve the speed of reads, so be dubious of any TRIM benchmarks that show an increase in read speed)
Click to expand...
so which ssd are safe according to you
 
grandM said:
Thanks I did. The article now blames linux kernel and states all SSD could suffer loss. Strange though the Intel devices had no data loss.
Click to expand...
Note that OS X does not use a Linux kernel, and there is a patch which resolves the data loss potential in Linux systems. None of this affects OS X.
 
Good old Linux. They want to be taken seriously, but STILL haven't fixed this rather fatal bug. Oops!
 
casperes1996 said:
For the record, we are, and always were agreed on that. I didn't go into details with what I said, but all of what you said was what I tried simplifying. But we can agree that for the majority of people, keeping the system at the "select boot drive" menu overnight, is not at all necessary, right?

Oh, and I see it as very unlikely Apple would keep a list of tested SSDs for consumers. For a few reasons.
1) They don't want people to tinker with their drives. At the very least not on newer machines. This command is for the people who they can't stop tinkering anyway, but they won't support those people massively. Never have.
2) it's work with no benefit.
3) 95% of SSDs work flawlessly anyway
Yes it would be nice, no they won't do it.



Yes and no. It's implemented, but it isn't active. Or that seems to be the case anyway. I haven't confirmed myself, but as you can see in this thread, others have.
Why you're seeing a performance boost, is because you did a wipe of everything. Fairly sure that when you erase all blocks and reinstall the OS, it also allows the SSD to see the free blocks as free
Click to expand...
Does the trimforce command delete everything on the drive? Or can it be done without data loss?
[doublepost=1464115746][/doublepost]How well does the trimforce command work with the Sandisk Ultra II?
 
jblagden said:
Okay, good. I just wanted to verify before I ran the trimforce command.

Also, how well does it work with the Sandisk Ultra?
Click to expand...
From reports so far, it seems to work just fine with any drive that supports the TRIM command like your Sandisk Ultra. I have not personally used that drive though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back