Which SSD - Crucial or OWC?

[SWD]

All is working very well.

After a day, boot time has been reduced to 30sec.

Write times at 210 MB/s and read 265 MB/s. Much better than the 30-50 I was getting before.

 

[Parkin Pig]

Congratulations - good to hear everything went well. It's particularly good to have an SSD in a portable machine - you don't need to worry about disk damage if you move it around while it's running.

Enjoy your newly turbocharged MBP!

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Crucial SSDs and TRIM/Garbage Collection

Since not all operating systems support TRIM, Crucial SSDs have a special feature called Active Garbage Collection. Active Garbage Collection is a process that helps an SSD maintain optimal performance by freeing up memory sectors that are no longer in use. Garbage collection is part of the SSD itself and thus not dependent on your computer’s operating system. Since garbage collection is part of the SSD’s firmware, it works regardless of which operating and filing systems your computer is using.

Which does not at all support your claim that it

indeed will cause conflict with TRIM enabling software.

 

[Parkin Pig]

Which does not at all support your claim that it

Took me 2 minutes to find these - probably less time than it took you to type your zero-researched reply.

Happy now?

 

[SWD]

Also this. Pretty recent too.

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/The-Cru/THE-CRU-To-TRIM-or-Not-to-TRIM-on-a-Mac-SSD/ba-p/143989

 

[SaSaSushi]

Took me 2 minutes to find these - probably less time than it took you to type your zero-researched reply.

In fairness, the articles you've linked to are one guy's opinion at Lifehacker from 3 years ago and OWC, a company selling SSDs with a proprietary controller for garbage collection (Sandforce).

In the article from last July I linked to earlier in this thread from Tom's Hardware, the verdict was that enabling TRIM on a Mac is almost always worth it and it improved, not decreased, performance. They even point out that performance can be increased on SSDs with Sandforce controllers using TRIM.

All things considered, I'm going to go with Tom's Hardware on this one.

Garbage collection is not a TRIM replacement. It's better than nothing however.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Took me 2 minutes to find these - probably less time than it took you to type your zero-researched reply.

Happy now?

Yea, yea - i've heard all that before but i've never seen anyone explain with any detail how or why it is bad, especially not with current generation drives and operating systems.

At the time your OWC "article" was written (more than 2.5 years ago), i'm fairly sure they were shipping their SSDs with the infamous Sandforce chipsets of the time which suffered from an extremely high failure rate and general unreliability which might explain their recommendation....or it might not - we'll never know because they provide exactly zero details.

 

[Parkin Pig]

In fairness, the articles you've linked to are one guy's opinion.

..and so is yours, and so is mine.

I do the occasional performance check on my Crucial SSD, and in the 2 years I've been using it without TRIM enabled, there has been absolutely no degradation in performance - and it gets some serious use for photo post-processing.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

..and so is yours, and so is mine.

Yea but you're the one making claims here, no him, not me. You're the one with nothing to back up your claims except the unsupported opinion of some pseudo-technology writer with Life Hacker, and an equally unbacked opinion from an OWC dude whose company was at the time shipping SSDs with dodgy chipsets, both of which are more than two and a half years old and provide no details whatsoever.

 

[Parkin Pig]

Yea but you're the one making claims here,

My claim is right below the few words of mine you actually quoted.

 

[SWD]

Anyways...

After manually restoring documents and iPhoto library, it turns out we could have gotten the smaller drive. Instead of using 170gb as the old drive does, we're only using 50gb. Much of that is music (now using iTunes Match) and 20gb of video podcasts my wife forgot to set to auto-delete. We have an iMac and a Drobo for all of our heavy data needs. Oh well, a little overhead never hurt.

I have another issue to sort out. This 2010 MBP always had issues with waking from sleep, as in it takes a while. I've turned off "put the HD to sleep when possible" and killed hibernation mode. I think that helped, though it's still really bad when the lid is closed. Opening the lid it can take minutes even several hard reboots to fix. I have a few more options to attempt to fix, but if you have any thoughts on the matter, by all means.