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raymondu999

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 11, 2008
1,009
1
Given that Apple already has enough faith in SL to put SSDs in their Airs, what's the verdict now? I'm hearing some people say that even without the existence of TRIM, SSDs in SL now only suffer minimal, negligible amounts of slowdown.
 
They have enough faith to also put them in MacBook Pros, Mac Pros and iMacs as options. But they are charging way too much for the privilege.
 
Well I don't really consider that as faith. Sure it's an option, but "option" kinda implies that anything that goes wrong, it was because we made the choice. Apple has enough faith to give all Air users an SSD and no other choice. Does it still slow down a lot nowadays? SSDs I mean. Assuming we can find SSDs with which we are comfortable with, price-wise.
 
For what it's worth, I just went with the compromise, the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. It's faster, but not blindingly so. I think the problem is that the size of my working set of files is greater than the size of the flash memory.

I think you could argue today that even without TRIM a SSD makes sense in a notebook computer (if you have the $$$) for the improved ruggedness.
 
Whats the consensus on slowdown rate? 1/2 speed after 6 months?
 
Whats the consensus on slowdown rate? 1/2 speed after 6 months?

I would sure hope it's not that bad. I have a friend with two intel SSD first gen's in raid1 for over a year now with no noticeable degradation. The SSD's he is using do not support TRIM. Background garbage collection, especially on the SandForce drives should be even better?
 
So what's a reasonable estimate? I understand that it won't immediately start slowing down, as it has free blocks which it can still write to. But how about after that?
 
Depending on the drive and computer, you're probably not going to notice much of a difference simply because the SSD is more than likely faster than the interface it's using. I remember that stupid article everyone pointed to with the original Air that "proved" TRIM wasn't needed. The problem was that the bandwidth of the Air was around (I'm trying to recall) 77 MB/s, but the SSD was capable of 100+ MB/s. So while the drive is technically slower, its slow state is still faster than what the computer can handle, and you won't notice a difference.

Now if the new MBPs are using the 6 Gbps SATA ports, then you may notice a difference, but that's going to depend on how current the drive is.
 
So how about in a theoretical scenario such as mine? I have the stock i7 MBP (with hires display, but everything else is stock, including the HDD) and I'm looking to upgrade (my friend is hellbent on getting me to just use a hybrid, but I'm not entirely convinced). How about that then?
 
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