Upgrading to Yosemite with Third-Party ssd's

[martinqm]

I'm thinking about Upgrading to Yosemite on my mac mini, primarily because I want to update to the latest version of Final Cut X, and this is only supported on Yosemite.

I put this off long ago because I'm using Third-Party SSD's, and I know that there were issues with this on Yosemite. If possible, I'd like to update now, but I'm not sure if this is a stable system for what I'm using. Here are my current specs below:

Mac Mini Late 2012
OS X Version 10.9.5
Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
16GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Memory
Startup Disk - 2x Crucial M550 256GB SATA in RAID-0

When I looked into this many months ago, I remember reading that Yosemite doesn't work well with non-apple SSD's, something about trim not working or otherwise. Does anyone know if this can be done now, or if there's a thread with a fix for this? Everything that I can find in searches is from a year ago.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[hwojtek]

No problems whatsoever in installing and running Yosemite on this system.
Trim will also work if enabled by Trim Enabler, note though: the kext signing check would need to be disabled. The (just slightly annoying) consequences are detailed here.

 

[martinqm]

No problems whatsoever in installing and running Yosemite on this system.
Trim will also work if enabled by Trim Enabler, note though: the kext signing check would need to be disabled. The (just slightly annoying) consequences are detailed here.

Fantastic, thanks hwojtek, this really helps! My other question would be, can I just upgrade and not worry about trim? Do you know if passing on Trim Enabler would create a slower or less stable system?

 

[hwojtek]

Do you know if passing on Trim Enabler would create a slower or less stable system?

I run a homemade FusionDrive on my Mac Pro 2,1 and don't worry about Trim most of the time, it's turned off, since the disk access is quick enough anyway. I do however keep a copy of Trim Enabler - every month or two I enable Trim, reboot the computer to make sure it works (disabling the kext signing in the process), then I reboot again to single-user mode (cmd+S on startup chime). When logged on to single-user mode I do what the screen actually suggests:

fsck -fy

This checks the startup disk and forces trim on the SSD, so after one sweep my SSD checked for errors and nicely trimmed.
After rebooting again I disable Trim for another month or two just to have kext signing system work as intended.
This might sound like a bit of a hassle, but doesn't take more than 5 minutes and I actually go through this procedure quite rarely, when a major system cleanup takes place anyway.
On my MBPro I didn't bother to turn on Trim at all, it's still blindingly fast (for a pre-unibody MBPro, that is).

 

[martinqm]

I run a homemade FusionDrive on my Mac Pro 2,1 and don't worry about Trim most of the time, it's turned off, since the disk access is quick enough anyway. I do however keep a copy of Trim Enabler - every month or two I enable Trim, reboot the computer to make sure it works (disabling the kext signing in the process), then I reboot again to single-user mode (cmd+S on startup chime). When logged on to single-user mode I do what the screen actually suggests:

fsck -fy

This checks the startup disk and forces trim on the SSD, so after one sweep my SSD checked for errors and nicely trimmed.
After rebooting again I disable Trim for another month or two just to have kext signing system work as intended.
This might sound like a bit of a hassle, but doesn't take more than 5 minutes and I actually go through this procedure quite rarely, when a major system cleanup takes place anyway.
On my MBPro I didn't bother to turn on Trim at all, it's still blindingly fast (for a pre-unibody MBPro, that is).

This sounds like a pretty good approach. I need to read more about all things trim, but I'm initially wondering: what is the advantage of enabling trim every month or so? Does this just make sure the drive is functioning properly? If trim was never enabled do you think this would be a bad strategy?

 

[hwojtek]

This sounds like a pretty good approach. I need to read more about all things trim, but I'm initially wondering: what is the advantage of enabling trim every month or so? Does this just make sure the drive is functioning properly? If trim was never enabled do you think this would be a bad strategy?

Well, on a disk without Trim enabled, the write speed will eventually decrease. On modern SSDs it's not as bad as it used to be (check the charts on Cindori's website) but still... I treat Trim as a sort of "defragmenting".
I will certainly not be able to check for decrease in speed in my MBPro (it's got SATA1, so even if the disk itself drops to 50% original speed I will still see the full bandwidth of the SATA1 bus) but honestly on the Mac Pro I do it just because somebody said "Trim is OK for your drive".

 

[RichardC300]

Cindori recently released Disk Sensei, the successor to Trim Enabler, and it's for 10.9 and up. You can manually trim your drive (as well as enable TRIM if you want), instead of doing the procedure that hwojtek mentioned, so it's pretty convenient. It also has a bunch of other neat drive health/drive monitor features. But if you only want to just enable TRIM, Trim Enabler still does the job nicely.

 

[martinqm]

Cindori recently released Disk Sensei, the successor to Trim Enabler, and it's for 10.9 and up. You can manually trim your drive (as well as enable TRIM if you want), instead of doing the procedure that hwojtek mentioned, so it's pretty convenient. It also has a bunch of other neat drive health/drive monitor features. But if you only want to just enable TRIM, Trim Enabler still does the job nicely.

Thanks for this, I'm definitely going to check out Disk Sensei. So far I've updated and have left Trim disabled, and things seem to be operating fast. I would like to run TRIM on this every once in awhile to make sure it stays fast.