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Which SSD has garbage collection and is best suitable with mac OSX?

Odd comments. What on earth is wrong with people trying to ensure that they spend their money wisely? You mention making a decision based on cost, performance and capacity - surely ongoing performance and thus the presence, or otherwise, of garbage collection is a valid point to discuss? The figures I have seen indicate that garbage collection or TRIM make a significant difference to performance. Perhaps if a drive's performance degraded significantly you would say it doesn't matter as long as it is faster than a HDD?

We should take this to it's logical conclusion and stop going on forums - far better things to do with your time. :p
 
Makes you wonder why they have bothered with TRIM or garbage collection if they make no difference.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/14

Doesn't that indicate an improvement in performance? Sure there is a lot more but not sure I can be bothered to run around finding it. If you have something to show that TRIM and garbage collection don't make a significant difference then please share it. The manufacturers will no doubt be utterly depressed to find they have wasted their time.
 
spooky69 said:
If you have something to show that TRIM and garbage collection don't make a significant difference then please share it. The manufacturers will no doubt be utterly depressed to find they have wasted their time.
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You should read what I actually said and not what you think I said.

The difference shows up in benchmarks. It's much harder to detect in actual, real-world usage.

TRIM and GC are not bad things. They are good features to have. But their absence is not enough to make it worthwhile to remove the SSD from your Mac, reformat it for a PC, and run the Intel SSD optimizer (as one poster in this thread suggested).

Nor is it worth it to "move music, media, the itunes folder, photos, downloads, and e-mail to your data drive", as another poster in this thread suggested.

It will almost certainly take more time to actually *do* those operations in the first place than you'll get back in improved performance.

Unless you actually *like* mucking about with your computer, in which case go for it and have fun.
 
Given the cost, isn't it likely that most people will have a smaller SSD than they would if buying an HDD? On that basis alone surely it is worth having data on another drive instead of on the SSD, as the more full the SSD gets the worse the performance is likely to get based on what I have read thus far.

I can fully appreciate that many differences on paper can be irrelevant in real-world situations, but you will no doubt also appreciate that you are one person on a forum expressing an opinion and there is nothing to say what your opinion is based on or how much merit it may have.
 
thanks for all of the replies.

First off, If i am making an investment into the SSD technology, I dont care too much about a small fall decrease in performance. What I do care about is that the SSD work in someway shape or form as when I first bought it, given if I take care of it.

By writing and deleting a lot of data, in which I plan to do, I do not want performance to decrease to 50% or anything below 80%. If history showed that over FIVE years performance goes from 100% to 80%, i can understand that. But going from 100 to 50 percent in less than a year is not acceptable.

The problem, as one poster stated in this thread is that there is a lot of misinformation floating around about SSDs. Ive been doing my research and I still cannot come up with solid facts. this is probably due to how new the tech is. I just want the information to make a educated decision in whether to buy now or wait a bit longer. GC looked liek a promising technology to keep my SSD performance at like new levels. Why would I want to buy a SSD without one when I can have one now?

Last thing, I have also seen LOTS of info on the intel SSD having and not having GC. Some people also say that intel has their OWN "technology" that is not public and that the drive does in the background. I cannot find any concrete info.


Look at it this way. If i buy a BMW ///M3 with 400+ HP, i expect that car to have somewhere near the 400HP 5 years from now(given that i take care of it). There is no way im paying a premium for the m3 only for it to drop its HP to drop to toyota corolla status
 
Just thought I'd thow my own ramblings in on the significance of TRIM and Garbage Collection. I can understand the OP's frustration with finding the real story on SSD perfomance issues. Another poster had commented something along the lines of "stop banging your head against the wall and just by a drive" and I think there is some wisdom in what he said.

The problem as I see it is there is a lot more hype floating around the web then there is fact. Here is what I felt I was reasonably confident in before pulling the trigger on two SSD's, the Intel 160GB G2 and the OWC 100GB based on the Sandforce controller. These two SSD's are both great performers but take different paths in how their controllers do what they need to do. So here is the SSD world as I see it.
1. TRIM and garbage collection are not the same thing though both serve the same purpose, to restore SSD performance. It's been hard to narrown down the what those difference are but from what I've put together TRIM is a bit more effective and GC a bit more CPU intensive.
2. Garbage collection and garbage collection are not the same thing. It's not one technology. The way that the Sandforce handles garbage collection is different from the way Indilinx does it.
3. A lot of the information showing how bad performance can fall off is based on 1st generation drives.
4. A lot of the bench marks showing performance fall off was achieved by writing to the drive in a worst case fashon rather then how most will actualy use the drive.
5. The performance hit over time is to the drives speed in writing small 4k random files. There is very little if any fall off in read performance.

The sources I place the most confidence in this point would be Anandtech and PC Perspective. PC Per has a pretty good table showing which controllers are used in the various SSD.

Battery's just about dead in the iPhone so I'll call it a night.
 
mattrothcline said:
Nor is it worth it to "move music, media, the itunes folder, photos, downloads, and e-mail to your data drive", as another poster in this thread suggested.
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I'm the poster who made this suggestion. It most certainly DOES make sense to move these things to a data drive, when as in my case, they are substantially greater in size than my entire SSD. I have about 250GB of various archived media, etc. How do you suggest I put those on my 160GB SSD? I'd love to know.

Before you criticize someone, better to understand what we're talking about. In the case of that quote, it was in reference to moving the entire /user folder over to a data drive. I made (the most demonstrably correct) observation that it's better to keep /user on the SSD and move only the data to the hard drive. This way, the /library files stay on the SSD to improve performance.
 
so many haters!

anyways, like i said earlier, Crucial m225 for the win. cost me 480 shipped brand new for a 256 GB. Has Garbage Collection if you want it. If you don't, you can downgrade the firmware. Win Win! If you want a cheap SSD, theres a g.skill 256 gb ssd going for very cheap on ebay.
 
The best and most extended discussion of cleanup of the Intel drive (and its controller) can be found here

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3618/intel-x25v-in-raid0-faster-than-x25m-g2-for-250/6

Basically, you don't have to worry about a degradation in performance over time with this drive. Under a very specific scenario - using the drive to capacity and doing so exclusively with small-block random writes - will temporarily degrade the drive. Essentially, this will never occur in any kind of normal usage scenario. Most critically, the Intel automatically restores performance to the NAND cells on the SSD whenever you do a sequential write. Performance can be restored by a sequential write, or if you want to be super-cautious, you can partiton off a small portion of the drive (the article suggests 10-20%) and that spare space will be used by the controller to keep performance high.

Someone elsewhere here asked about Intels non-TRIM using "garbage collection". This is the article that talks about that, with extended benchmarks and tests.

Again, the bottom line is, you can use the Intel X25m (and v, actually) worry free. Great drive, consistent performance, and it cleans itself quite nicely without your intervention, independent of TRIM or the OS you're using.
 
mattrothcline said:
You're wasting more time by doing these steps than you will gain by any increase in performance.

SSDs do get a bit slower over time. In 5 years, your drive may be 10% slower. *Maybe*.

But even if that does happen, you won't notice it.

Really, you won't.

If you want to spend your time wisely, then be more productive with your SSD and spend the time you save by going outside, or playing with your dog, or reading a book.
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Can you say this from experience? I can tell you that my Intel X25-M G2 was starting to experience some freezing after a few months of use. After I ran the Intel SSD optimizer, the freezing went away. SSDs are still a very new technology, so it will take some work to maintain them properly. I wouldn't call this a waste of time
 
its not a waste of time. 500 is a lot of money especially for a hard drive. I'd rather pay 500 for one with garbage collection.... Why not? Unless youre dumb.
 
ttran88 said:
so many haters!

anyways, like i said earlier, Crucial m225 for the win. cost me 480 shipped brand new for a 256 GB. Has Garbage Collection if you want it. If you don't, you can downgrade the firmware. Win Win! If you want a cheap SSD, theres a g.skill 256 gb ssd going for very cheap on ebay.
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are you serious?!?!?!?!

tell me where you got the crucial m225 SSD for 480?!?!? as soon as you post a link I will be buying
 
Vyruz Reaper said:
are you serious?!?!?!?!

tell me where you got the crucial m225 SSD for 480?!?!? as soon as you post a link I will be buying
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serious :)

I got the only one on ebay :) Others were priced at 600+! and I found this brand new one for 525. with 8% bing, it came out to 480 shipped no tax no nothin! just a brand new SSD. Installed it, firmware was already upgraded to the newest one so I was set. Its so fast :) You will not regret buying this drive. Its faster than the intels!
 
bob5820 said:
Just thought I'd thow my own ramblings in on the significance of TRIM and Garbage Collection. I can understand the OP's frustration with finding the real story on SSD perfomance issues. Another poster had commented something along the lines of "stop banging your head against the wall and just by a drive" and I think there is some wisdom in what he said.
Click to expand...

So if you had the choice to buy a M5 with 500 HP, E63 AMG with 460 HP, or a Porsche 911 with 475 HP spending a premium amount on these cars for THEIR performance, they dont come with a lot of features as other full size sedans do (as of the space of a HDD 500GB) And if I told you that the M5 and Porsche 911 could potentially loose their HP power down to around 250 HP, your telling me you wouldnt search around and make sure you end up buying the e63 amg which has engine care embedded in its engine?
 
I personally went with the Intel for the proven track record. I was really strongly considering the Crucial M225 but then I started reading Crucial forums, anandtech comments, and the like and there seems to be some firmware issues going on with the drives. I want speed but I need reliability and over time, Intel leads in reliability and that made my choice easy.

For what its worth, I paid $370 for the 160GB drive using the same procedure as the poster above. (eBay + 8% Bing Cashback). Not sure if Bing cashback for eBay is currently active, but it's usually back every other week and there are plenty of new G2 drives on eBay around $400.
 
ttran88 said:
serious :)

I got the only one on ebay :) Others were priced at 600+! and I found this brand new one for 525. with 8% bing, it came out to 480 shipped no tax no nothin! just a brand new SSD. Installed it, firmware was already upgraded to the newest one so I was set. Its so fast :) You will not regret buying this drive. Its faster than the intels!
Click to expand...

I dont care about speed TOO much. 230 vs 200 vs 250 is all about the same to me bc it way faster than a 5400 rpm hdd can manage. I just want to keep the drives performance at new levels. GC seems like a good technology to invest in.

Im going to shop around a bit for one. thanks for the info!
 
Vyruz Reaper said:
I dont care about speed TOO much. 230 vs 200 vs 250 is all about the same to me bc it way faster than a 5400 rpm hdd can manage. I just want to keep the drives performance at new levels. GC seems like a good technology to invest in.

Im going to shop around a bit for one. thanks for the info!
Click to expand...

BH has the best prices on the Crucial M225 without having to jump through BS hoops. Just went that route myself.

cheers
JohnG
 
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