On Apr 4, 2014, at 10:05 PM, John Robinson wrote: > I think you would know an answer to this, many others may as well. I have > begun going to the FileMaker user group meetings, at the end of last weeks > there was a discussion concerning the problems SSD drives have when there is > lots of writing to disk, seemingly the drives slow to a crawl and are even > rendered useless.
I've not bought a pure SSD for my laptop yet because I’m happy with the Seagate hybrid drive I bought last year. It was a lot cheaper and is plenty fast. (1 TB conventional + 8GB flash for $90 at the time from Fry's — probably cheaper now) SSD drives are not so good for jobs that repeatedly change a lot of data on the disk because they have to erase an entire block in order to write a single byte. If the same data is being changed many times, this gives a lot of overhead because they copy the 512K block into cache, erase the block on the drive, change the byte in the cache and then write the whole thing back. A spinny hard drive doesn't have to wipe a block before writing new data. It must be noted that even with the added overhead, the SSD probably still wins the race. > I purchased a Samsung SSD 500 gb. drive for my Mini, it's amazingly fast but > a program I use continually writes to disk so I began looking for a solution. That's why the trim stuff was invented. It tries to erase freed-up blocks during free time to shorten the whole copy-erase-rewrite cycle. It might not help with super-active programs, but it will help a lot of the time. > I understand the Apple SSD drives have a built in "trim" function in the > Utility program, but this won't work on other SSD Drives. Jonathan said the > drives he uses do the "trim" on their own and need no attention but one of > the answers on the Apple forum stated that those drives also do not do the > true "trim", rather something like a garbage dump? Apple baked trim support into OS X quite a while ago, but only turns it on for its own drives. There are lots of pages that tell you how to turn it on for non-Apple drives with terminal commands. There are also programs you can buy to do it, if you're terminal averse. I've turned it on in Mavericks for a couple of people from the terminal. I also know one person who used TRIM Enabler for a new SSD in her Mini. As far as I know, the results were identical in both cases. > O.K., I am way over my head, I did write to the software company I use for > the posting of the data and they showed me how to put the data file on the > second drive on the Mini, but that doesn't help with knowing what to do in > the future concerning the maintenance of the Samsung drive, or any other > brand for that matter. > > What do you suggest, is there a software program that will to the "trim" for > ALL SSD drives? Is it really necessary? I'd be wary of running a program that constantly refreshes a lot of data on an SSD. Spinning hard drives can be written and erased for millions of cycles, but FLASH memory usually has a guaranteed cycle life of less than 100,000 or so. Constantly churning the data on an SSD is going to wear it out. It's interesting that the life of FLASH memory on SSDs might be getting worse, not better, because the faster you read-write the memory, the more quickly it wears out, and there's a lot of pressure to make faster drives.
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