SSDs, maintenance, and Macs - what up?
November 8, 2010 7:09 AM Subscribe
I've done my fair share of googling and reading countless forum posts, but I'm still a bit puzzled as to what things I should be doing to maintain performance of this here new SSD (OCZ Agility2 120G) I just installed in my MacBook Pro.
I've read about OS X's lack of TRIM, turning off noatime, and minimizing disk writes, but besides these things what else can I do to keep this drive speedy? Should I upgrade the firmware on the drive? It's currently at 1.11, and I'm reading conflicting information on whether it's a good idea to upgrade firmwares or not.
Is there anything else I should keep an eye on?
I've read about OS X's lack of TRIM, turning off noatime, and minimizing disk writes, but besides these things what else can I do to keep this drive speedy? Should I upgrade the firmware on the drive? It's currently at 1.11, and I'm reading conflicting information on whether it's a good idea to upgrade firmwares or not.
Is there anything else I should keep an eye on?
Without TRIM support, you're going to be reliant on background garbage collection in the drive firmware. Given it's a new sandforce based drive, you shouldn't see a particularly bad write performance hit over time without TRIM, unless you're really hammering it with constant write changes - i.e. very non standard desktop usage, such as a database server.
Turning off noatime and minimizing small random writes as much as is reasonable will do fine unless you have some really strange use case. I have a pair of vertex 2e sandforce based SSDs, and tested them fairly heavily in a RAID config to see how they handled non-TRIM setups for random writes. Performance degradation was pretty minimal to be honest, for both OS and gaming-drive storage purposes. I think some of the OEM sandforce based SSDs coming out don't even have TRIM support, and rely purely on the built in GC.
Personally, I always update SSDs with newer firmware whenever possible (and ocz do do good firmwares as a rule), as they're forever improving them, but I don't know about the Agility 2 specifically in that respect.
posted by ArkhanJG at 9:44 AM on November 8, 2010
Turning off noatime and minimizing small random writes as much as is reasonable will do fine unless you have some really strange use case. I have a pair of vertex 2e sandforce based SSDs, and tested them fairly heavily in a RAID config to see how they handled non-TRIM setups for random writes. Performance degradation was pretty minimal to be honest, for both OS and gaming-drive storage purposes. I think some of the OEM sandforce based SSDs coming out don't even have TRIM support, and rely purely on the built in GC.
Personally, I always update SSDs with newer firmware whenever possible (and ocz do do good firmwares as a rule), as they're forever improving them, but I don't know about the Agility 2 specifically in that respect.
posted by ArkhanJG at 9:44 AM on November 8, 2010
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The rationale behind this is that while your data will change frequently, your OS and programs will not (barring updates and such). This may help to ensure longevity because of lesser writes to the disk. Also, given that your SSD is quite small in capacity, you might not have enough space anyway.
posted by titantoppler at 7:29 AM on November 8, 2010