BEST SSDs for use in Pro Tools ? - New Samsung 850 Pro

[JFreak]

OWC does over-provisioning on the fly so it's better than the drives that rely on TRIM

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

OWC does over-provisioning on the fly so it's better than the drives that rely on TRIM

"over provision on the fly" -- there is no such thing.



You mean garbage collect? *All* SSDs garbage collect, and it's a complex topic. But if you are actually bumping up against high sustained write needs then nothing beats a good TRIM implementation.



The saving grace is if you never need to push high sustained write performance you'll never run into a TRIM/non-TRIM related performance degradation. You *might* eventually run into increased wear/reduced life caused by the write amplification caused by that garbage collection needing to move around all the blocks that are actually been erased/no longer in use by the OS, but the drive does not/cannot know about that if TRIM is not used..



The only real upside of wanting to not use TRIM is if the drive/firmware is flaky and does not support TRIM well, which was the case with older Sandforce controllers/firmware that OWC used... and a lesson in my book why you do not want to buy a Sandforce based drive, or any drive that relies on a third party controller and firmware. I want the drive vendor to be able to fix bugs quickly and not wait on a third party OEM that may or may have other priorities.

[imwaltraud]

Originally Posted by Drew Mazurek

Warning: thread hijack!! Sorry, but there seems to be some SSD gurus here!!

I recently installed Crucial SSDs in my laptop as well as my wife's. Mine was a 512, her's was a 256.

Short version:
Her's has been flawless, all good.

Mine... takes up to 4-5 minutes to boot, but once up, performance is great, no complaints.

My Macbook 2010 was doing the same after I replaced the internal HD with a Crucial SSD. Resetting the NVRAM fixed it for me.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

"over provision on the fly" -- there is no such thing.

You mean garbage collect?

Pardon me for poor selection of words. But yes, you got it.

[Drew Mazurek]

Originally Posted by Drew Mazurek

Warning: thread hijack!! Sorry, but there seems to be some SSD gurus here!!

I recently installed Crucial SSDs in my laptop as well as my wife's. Mine was a 512, her's was a 256.

Short version:
Her's has been flawless, all good.

Mine... takes up to 4-5 minutes to boot, but once up, performance is great, no complaints.

Strange fact: If I boot into Safe mode, it'll still take a while to boot, but on the restart after the safe boot it boots in 15 seconds like you'd expect it to.

I've been in touch with Crucial CS but nothing they've told me helped.

TRIM is enabled BTW.

Thanks in advance for any info anyone might have.

And again, sorry fro the hijack.

Update.

Never did solve this issue...... until updating the laptop to 10.10. Problem went away. Boots in 12 seconds now.

[francois]

There is an issue with Trim if you are using Yosemite.
I had to revert to 10.9.5 as i lost my boot drive last week
Looks like to run 10.10 you need a Apple certified drive .
I think the OWC are also apple certified.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by francois

There is an issue with Trim if you are using Yosemite.
I had to revert to 10.9.5 as i lost my boot drive last week
Looks like to run 10.10 you need a Apple certified drive .
I think the OWC are also apple certified.

Ah no, and no. There is no such thing as "Apple Certified" drives. And you can install and use Yosemite on any drive you want, including a SSD with or without TRIM enabled, as long as you can follow basic instructions.

OS X only automatically enables TRIM on Apple supplied drives, for third party drives (Samsung, OWC, Micron, ... whoever) you have to enable it yourself, if you want the benefits of TRIM. The easiest way is to use Cindori Trim enabler. That uses a small OS X kernel extension (kext aka device driver) to enable TRIM (it is not actually trimming the drive, doing anything complex, all it is doing is kicking OS X in the ass and telling it that it should use TRIM on the drive). In Yosemite Apple is requiring mandatory kext digital signing. The simple work around is to disable the digital signing requirement, but that has an issue if things go wrong on the computer (and reenable kext signing) and you need to boot from that drive with non-signed kext (--you just need to know about that in the rare case that happens). All this has been flogged to death before on DUC and is very well described on www.cindori.org.

The only non-Apple drives this does not apply to is the Angelbird "Wrk for Mac" SSD that spoofs Apple's SATA vendor string so OS X just uses TRIM with them. they certainly are not "Apple Certified and I expect Apple might respond in unpleasant ways to vendors playing that game.

[Drew Mazurek]

Yes, of course it installed and works perfectly, faster than ever actually. Mostly due to the OS I'm sure.

Darryl,
What's the down side to not using Trim? I put an SSD in this 6 year old laptop to get a few extra years out of it. The increase in performance has been amazing even with my prior issue. I understand that Trim helps SSDs last longer? But I will likely replace this machine within a few more years. Just wondering if taking this computer to 10.10 and loosing Trim (not interested in disabling kexts) will come back to bite me.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Drew Mazurek

Yes, of course it installed and works perfectly, faster than ever actually. Mostly due to the OS I'm sure.

Darryl,
What's the down side to not using Trim? I put an SSD in this 6 year old laptop to get a few extra years out of it. The increase in performance has been amazing even with my prior issue. I understand that Trim helps SSDs last longer? But I will likely replace this machine within a few more years. Just wondering if taking this computer to 10.10 and loosing Trim (not interested in disabling kexts) will come back to bite me.

Downside of not enabling TRIM is lower maximum sustained write performance and increased cell wear. Without TRIM a drive never knows when data is actually deleted from the disk by the OS, it only knows data is no longer there when the OS overwrites the same blocks on the file system. At which time the disks real time garbage collector may have to struggle to erase blocks to provide space for new data to be written, lowering write performance of the drive. And all that extra data has been moved around/fragments consolidated etc. inside the drive, even though it was already really deleted by the OS. All that extra unnecessary movement (the "write-amplification") causes extra cell wear. TRIM simply eliminates all this given the OS a way of telling the drive that data has actually been deleted and the drive can just get rid of it straight away. So TRIM is not important on drives that are read only or almost all read-only, like sample drives. And may make no difference to write performance unless you are writing at high sustained rates. But not having it will increase cell wear on drives that are written to, how much depends on usage patterns, but it can be significant.

The work around in Yosemite for Cindori Trim Enabler is you are not "disabling kexts" you are disabling kext digital signing, which you never had enforced before anyhow so I'm not getting why it would be a huge loss. The primary protection about bad kexts and similar things being installed on your system is with the computer administrator not being careless.

[Drew Mazurek]

Thanks Darryl.

Yeah, I miswrote about the kexts, I know what's up with that. My hesitation is what you need to do if your P-RAM gets reset, that process of having to get back in to your drive seems like trouble is all.

My laptop is just an email/internet machine, wondering if I'll even notice the performance hit.