The Curious Case of SSD Performance In OS X

mr_sifter writes "As we've seen from previous coverage, TRIM support is vital to help SSDs maintain performance over extended periods of time — while Microsoft and the SSD manufacturers have publicized its inclusion in Windows 7, Apple has been silent on whether OS X will support it. bit-tech decided to see how SSD performance in OS X is affected by extended use — and the results, at least with the Macbook Air, are startling. The drive doesn't seem to suffer very much at all, even after huge amounts of data have been written to it."

Comments

Apple is waiting to patent iSSD first

[kolbe]

Seriously though, MAC OS X has its roots with the BSD's of the world (Mach kernel http://developer.apple.com/macosx/architecture/) and one need only visit any of the number of SSD inquiries from the FreeBSD community to get an idea of how Mac OS X would respond at a kernel level: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1169 for example.

Granted, there are some filesystem differences between the other BSD flavors and MAC OS X, but the architectures are very similar and one can draw the same conclusion as this parent review did:

MAC OS X can run quite well on SSD drives, it just hasn't been sanctioned by Big Brother Jobs yet. Remember too, Apple offered 128GB SSD's in their Mac Book Pro's as far back as 2008, so it's nothing new.

If you don't mind voiding your Apple warranty, I'd say go for it!

Re:Why not just open fs.blocksize to 64-256k?

[AHuxley]

TRIM makes you need Win 7 for real ;)