Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rawsyntax 5401 days ago
From what I read at the time, (january 2011) sandforce based SSDs got much better performance on mac systems. I think this was to do with OSX's lack of support for TRIM.

On the other hand, right after I upgraded my SSD, I went to ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3, which are much slower due in part to a bug that makes requiring files take forever.

1 comments

Not sure about others, but in my case (10 MBP 13" w/ Vertex2 in optibay), I had occasional stalls (anywhere from 2-30 sec) until the TRIM Enabler ( http://www.groths.org/?p=308 ) showed up and I installed it (OSX Lion supports TRIM on this drive natively, it seems).

I think this is because, although sandforce drives have native garbage collection, it can sometimes happen at a very inopportune moment (like say, a 20s "pause" during critical moments of a SC2 game).

By the way, do not use that Trim Enabler. If you want to and are aware of the risks, use this one, especially if you plan on using it with Lion: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

What this does is actually pretty simple, it replaces the string “Apple SSD” (used to identify for which drives trim is turned on) in a file in the relevant kernel extension with zeros. It also creates a backup copy of the original file.

The Trim Enabler you linked to replaces a whole kernel extension (meaning you might end up with an older version of a kernel extension) which is obviously monumentally stupid.