Thanks Lee, your advise as always is so wise. I wonder if Apple has calculated this into their SSD drives for in the past the purchaser didn't worry much about maintenance and in my case I have used so many of their computers for years and years before I drop a hard drive. I originally thought I would put the SSD drives as the primary drive in most of my machines, not so now, and I tremendously thank you for your reply.
John On Apr 5, 2014, at 11:25 AM, Lee Larson <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > MacGroup mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
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