Sata Issues with 17" MBP and TRIM...

[klinic]

For the Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD 240GB in particular. Everything has led me to believe that the Samsung 470 is a lot more reliable, if not faster. However, shipping it to Australia with warranty in tact, if at all, is looking impossible.

How will this guy do? SATA II should not cause any problems in the 2011 17", right? I don't know if this has any internal TRIM support, or if I'm going to run into problems in OS X with performance degradation.

Any Australians with experience with OWC performance, reliability and warranty feedback?

 

[bb426]

For the Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD 240GB in particular. Everything has led me to believe that the Samsung 470 is a lot more reliable, if not faster. However, shipping it to Australia with warranty in tact, if at all, is looking impossible.

How will this guy do? SATA II should not cause any problems in the 2011 17", right? I don't know if this has any internal TRIM support, or if I'm going to run into problems in OS X with performance degradation.

Any Australians with experience with OWC performance, reliability and warranty feedback?

SATA II is more reliable than SATA III. I'm not an Aussie (that would be cool though ) and I haven't used those SSD's in particular but I can tell you that by default OS X does not enable TRIM on third party drives (so you will not have OS level support for TRIM, although there are patches out there that you can use to enable it, use at your own risk and do some research on your drive: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/). But if your drive supports its own Garbage Collection and/or TRIM, then it shouldn't be a problem.

The only problem is the spotty performance of SSD's and 15/17" MBP's. Most likely you won't have any issues if it's SATA II but I can't make a 100% statement. Maybe 99%

 

[klinic]

I'm actually having trouble finding out whether it DOES support garbage collection or not. And I've heard of LOTS of problems with the TRIM enabler hack. Lots of beachballs. :/

 

[bb426]

I'm actually having trouble finding out whether it DOES support garbage collection or not. And I've heard of LOTS of problems with the TRIM enabler hack. Lots of beachballs. :/

Did you go on the manufacturer's website? If it does support garbage collection/TRIM they will definitely advertise it. If it's a Sandforce controller, then yes it does have that.

And I've heard that too, but I'm getting beach balls with and without it. It seems to work better with it in my case (even though my controller is Sandforce... might be a foolish decision but I'm exchanging this drive sometime soon to see if it's the drive). Just try it. If it doesn't work, you can always disable it. That site shows you how.

 

[klinic]

Yeah, that was the first place I looked. It DOES have "Ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling" and it is a Sandforce drive, although when I looked I didn't know that meant that it definitely had Garbage Collection.


Now all I need to know is how the warranty goes.

 

[Bigmacduck]

OWC Mercury Extreme 3G and 6G better WITHOUT TRIM

For the Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD 240GB in particular.... I don't know if this has any internal TRIM support, or if I'm going to run into problems in OS X with performance degradation...

Check out the following blog entry on OWC's website: http://blog.macsales.com/11051-to-trim-or-not-to-trim-owc-has-the-answer

I have a Mercury Extreme Pro 3G 480 GB (SATA II) SSD in my 2011 15" MBP. I am operating it without TRIM Enabler and I fully rely on the advanced built-in garbage collection. I use it very intensively since March (sometimes filling almost the whole drive) and I have not experienced any performance degradation.

TRIM is a good feature for inferior SSDs. Superior SSD's like OWC's with highly effective built-in garbage collection don't benefit from TRIM at all - quite the opposite as above linked blog describes.

 

[Weaselboy]

Check out the following blog entry on OWC's website: http://blog.macsales.com/11051-to-trim-or-not-to-trim-owc-has-the-answer

I have a Mercury Extreme Pro 3G 480 GB (SATA II) SSD in my 2011 15" MBP. I am operating it without TRIM Enabler and I fully rely on the advanced built-in garbage collection. I use it very intensively since March (sometimes filling almost the whole drive) and I have not experienced any performance degradation.

TRIM is a good feature for inferior SSDs. Superior SSD's like OWC's with highly effective built-in garbage collection don't benefit from TRIM at all - quite the opposite as above linked blog describes.

That blog entry is BS. They link to their buddy Diglloyd where he proclaims TRIM is "half-assed" with absolutely no explanation of why he thinks this. Somehow you are just supposed to believe this because the writer is a "performance testing expert."

If anything, the fact that Sandforce drives (like OWC) do not work well with TRIM should give you pause. TRIM is a standard ATA command and if a drive is designed properly to that standard, TRIM should just work.

 

[Bigmacduck]

TRIM does work perfectly on the OWC SSD's. I had this 480 GB drive in a Windows 7 PC before without problems and TRIM enabled. The problem comes through Apple's implementation of TRIM. Apple knows this and that's why the have only enabled it for Apple SSDs. There is no marketing reason behind not enabling TRIM for all capable SSDs, it is a technical reason. Apple needs to do some more homework here.