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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."
The rain was getting harder. It was now precisely 11:51 PM, and Mark was into his fifth beer. He was feeling pretty invincible but the night was young, and he intended to get wasted before it was all over. He had put in a rough week at work and he deserved it.
He lit another cigarette. He and his drinkin' buddies sat in their traditional circle, in Ian's apartment. The talk wandered from sex to work, back to sex, to basketball, finally settling on sex. Mark had eaten lunch at Taco Bell, and had drunk four cups of coffee between lunchtime and quitting. In addition, the beers were beginning to settle in. And now, at 11:51 PM, Mark had to take a shit. He stood up. "Shit break," he announced. It was customary among this group to make such an announcement.
Mark walked to the bathroom. As he locked the door behind him, thunder boomed. It was storming out there.
He pulled his pants down and sat on the toilet. Ian's bathroom was a mess. He counted five empty toilet paper rolls, two paperbacks, and yesterday's newspaper. His friends laughed about something. The lights flickered for a moment, and the pre-shit growl came from within. He could feel the product lined up inside him for disposal. Then, he began to push.
Plop. The first piece fell to the water. Then some movement, and Mark felt the main feature inside him, the mother lode. He grunted softly as he squeezed it out. It crackled past his sphincter, and splashed neatly into the bowl.
Then another one queued up, and came out. It was almost as big as its predecessor. Mark would have well-purged bowels tonight, he realized with a smirk. He heard thunder again, closer this time.
Another one? Jeez, he thought. When was my last shit? It ventured forth, Mark's muscles helping it out. It was the biggest one so far. The shit's passage through his anus, that rarest mix of pain and pleasure, was longer than any he could remember. Ahhhh...the stout log advanced with conviction. This was definitely going to be his finest creation; this was a huge one. Still grinning, he wondered if Ian had a camera.
He pushed. Peering between his legs, past his genitals, he saw that it had reached the water. This was like seeing the longest freight train ever. Damn, it was a wide one. And it was still attached! And there was more! He pushed more, harder. It kept coming. He couldn't even feel the end of this one yet; soon it was bending, folding on itself like a sundae topping. Mark stopped pushing and caught his breath. He was sweating; he realized that however long this piece of shit was, it wasn't nearly all the way out yet. He still couldn't feel the end.
He pushed, he strained, it kept coming. His intestines couldn't be that damn long, but this shit just wouldn't quit. In fact, he was feeling the diarrhoeal urgency of *having* to shit. He dutifully answered nature's call, and pushed harder. His efforts were rewarded with more shit. His sphincter was too strained to even pinch the loaf off. It was whole and complete.
He couldn't feel the end.
Fear now came to Mark. He flushed the toilet to make room for more. Even as the bowl refilled, the cramps rose up, and he pushed. Within seconds, the shit extended from his anus to bottom of the bowl. The harder he pushed, the more he had to shit. And it was getting worse. He scarcely had time to catch his breath; his face was quite red as he grunted and struggled to keep up. The shit seemed endless. He looked between his legs again, and gasped as he saw that the bowl was fully a quarter filled with his product, the water dangerously high. The tank wasn't even done filling, but he flushed again. Unfortunately, the plumbing was unable to handle the volume of feces, and the toilet backed up. Mark jumped when the cold water touched his buttocks.
It was now 11:57. Thunder roared outside as water and shit particles flowed onto the tile.
Mark's pants were bunched about his ankles, and he was in pain. The shit advanced relentlessly as he stumbled into the bathtub. He was almost panicking now, and
That is startling!
As the family wagon pulled into a small truck stop in the middle of nowhere, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda's father turned to him and his mother.
"Who else is hungry? "
They had been driving across state to visit family and were now heading back home again. The problem is that it's a long drive and Rob's portable Ogg Vorbis player ran out of battery a long time ago. Without his collection of Creative Commons music and GNU/Linux oggcasts, all he has had to entertain himself with was his imagination, and like every other overweight manchild, he couldn't help but fantasize about things of an x-rated nature. All this had gotten him rather hot and horny so as his parents headed into the small cafeteria attached to the gas station he told them he was feeling a little car sick and needed to go to the toilet for a while.
"Okay Rob" said his mother. "We'll be inside having lunch, take your time darling. But make sure you have something to eat okay?"
"Okay" muttered Rob as he headed off in the direction of the arrow marked 'Toilets'.
He walked around the corner of the small service building close to where some other cars and trucks were parked, and headed away from the main road. The toilets seemed like they where pretty far away but that was okay with Rob, he would need some privacy. Around the back of the building stood a small wooden hut with two toilet stalls inside, Rob thought it didn't look much like a public toilet but he was in too much of a hurry to care. He entered the small hut and closed the door, unfortunately it didn't have a lock so he moved past the sinks and into one of the stalls. This door had a rusty old lock that looked pretty flimsy, but the other stall was not an option, it was just too filthy, so Rob closed the stall door and sat down.
He pulled his jeans down to his knees and removed his hardening cock from his tight underwear. A hideous chud of 19 years, Rob had a stocky build and a goatee; he had dark blond hair and brown eyes and was covered head to toe in sickly-looking pasty-white skin. He began to rub his cock which grew even harder in his hand, at its full length it was about 4 and a half inches but looked larger as Rob shaved and waxed most of his body as it made certain sports such as LARP easier. All of the fantasies from the car trip rushed through his mind and he felt his orgasm building up. He noticed the graffiti on the back of the door, there where some stupid tags but front and center was a drawing of a large cock dripping with cum. Strangely this aroused Rob who was straight but he put it out of his mind to focus on the task at hand.
He was jerking his cock nice and hard when Rob heard footsteps outside the toilet and froze, worrying that it might be his parents or that he might have been moaning loudly, he sat in complete silence. The door of the bathroom opened and Rob heard someone enter, he listened as they walked slowly across the dirty tiled floor and stopped outside the stall he was sitting in. then, without warning the lock snapped off and the door flew open to reveal a large trucker standing there with his grubby hand holding the handle. He was big, he took up the entire door frame with his size, he was hairy too, beard stubble covered his dark rugged face and thick black hair ran down his exposed forearms. He wore a red checked long sleeved shirt that was rolled up to his elbows, black jeans, workers boots and a cap which covered more dark hair.
Tall and bulky, the trucker looked down at Rob, who was almost half his size. Rob tried to cover himself up but he was frozen with shock and fear.
"Heh heh!" the huge stranger laughed in a deep and menacing voice. "Listen up whore! I'm gonna fuck you hard and rough and you're gonna like it! No one can hear you scream back here so don't even try it! And if you don't do exactly as I say, I will pound the shit out of ya. Then I'll go and pound your mom and your dad too! You got that?!"
Rob sat there stunned. This guy was definitely not joking and Rob knew he had no chance against this gu
The day after thanksgiving a few years ago, Richard Stallman was sitting on the toilet constipated. After about 4 days without being able to take a shit he finally decided to force it out. Straining himself, he began pushing really hard and eventually he started to hear a dripping into the toilet.
"Almost got it," he thought, and gave it one more big push. Kaaa splooosh! What a relief, he must have lost at least ten pounds right there. He started to wipe, but he then noticed that his hand was covered with blood. He quickly jumped up to see a pile of bloody intestines trailing their way back to his ripped open bloody asshole.
"Oh God! I can't believe this is happening to me," the distressed hacker yelled, grabbing his intestines out of the toilet and trying to push them back into his ass. The experience was so disgusting that he puked all over himself and passed out. His dog Hurd found him later that day and ate most of the intestines that were outside of his body. How did he survive you ask? Well, lets just say that the power of GNU Emacs should never be underestimated.
One time when Eric S. Raymond was young he got a small jar of mustard stuck up his ass. It was so far up there that he had to go to the doctors to have it removed. When the doctor went in for an exploratory he could not find the mustard jar.
"How far is it up inside you?", the doctor asked him.
"It's deep in there," Eric said, "keep looking."
The doctor then proceeded to reach farther into his anal cavity, but still no jar.
"I cant seem to reach it," the doc said. "I think we will have to do an x-ray, to see whereabouts the jar is in your ass."
"No. That's OK," he said back to the doctor, "I just wanted you to stick your hand up my ass. That's all."
After that the hospital banned him from coming back, but the doctor is now and forever a valued contributor to open-source.
Uh-huh. Can I point out though that whilst such stuff may well be for nerds, normal users are the first to complain when their system is slow or it keeps crashing, etc.
One time I was at a free software convention and Linus Torvalds started to make conversation with me. He kept talking about all the women at the event that he would like to have sex with. Making jokes and gestures to his crotch. I just smiled. None of what he said I found amusing. He was really obnoxious. "I wanna fuck all the chicks, I'm no Faggot!" Linus said. After a small uncomfortable silence. I said , "I'm gay and I think I want to have sex with you." He then yelled something I couldn't understand, called me a fucking fag, then tried to beat me up. I was much bigger than him so I was actually able to beat him into unconsciousness. I then stripped him down to nothing, tied him to a nearby column, and got everyone at the event to insert at least one object into his ass before they left. The moral of this story is to not use GNU/Linux, it will make you gay.
You can't really draw any conclusions from these results. In one particular Mac, Apple ships a particular Samsung SSD that doesn't degrade, probably because its "clean" performance is already terrible (you might think of it as "pre-degraded"). In other Macs Apple ships Toshiba SSDs that may have completely different behavior. If you put a good SSD (e.g. Intel) in your Mac the behavior will be completely different.
I've got a Vertex 60 in a While unibody macbook and it works fine, boot is 7-9 seconds, apps load almost instantly even if i start 10 at the same time.
I know TRIM doesn't work yet in OS X but the drive seems to take care of itself just fine.
Maybe they should take the drive over to a Windows XP and Windows 7 box and see if it's the drive hardware being resilient or the OS. The G1 intel drives don't drop a ton after use, and they don't support TRIM. It looks like the Intel G1 flash is artificially capped by the controller. It could be similar here.
Did You Know? After maintaining a vow of silence for almost 7 years, Red Hat Linux founder Marc Ewing now freely admits that he named Red Hat Linux after Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst's trademark red New York Yankees baseball cap.
Durst and Ewing met in Ewing's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina (Durst was raised in Gastonia, NC), where they became fast friends, sharing the same passion for low-level system programming.
Durst collaborated with Ewing on the first preview beta of Red Hat Linux before the demands of his rocketing stardom forced him to abandon his hobby and tour with his band.
Durst's position on the development team was filled by Damien Neil, and not many know of his contribution to the popular Linux distribution; however, a google search through the source code on Redhat.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=wfd+site:redhat.com) reveals many snippets of code authored by 'wfd', Durst's initials (William Frederick Durst).
Durst asked Ewing to keep his 'geeky' roots a secret as it would not lend itself to Durst's bad boy image, but as Ewing points out, it was "only a matter of time" before the origins of his NASDAQ-100 company's name were uncovered.
Totally gay.
It depends a lot on how the drive works.
Intel drives actually use the whole drive for scratch space. Until a sector is written to. Then without TRIM it only has its tiny bit of extra scratch space to work with. That's why intel drives degrade so badly without TRIM.
Indilinx Barefoot controllers on the other hand ONLY use their scratch space, they never use the normal writing space of the drive as scratch space.
See here.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/9
While it does show the synthetic tests degrading with lack of trim, even more than the intel drives, the real world use tests show they suffer almost 0% loss in performance.
Depending on which controller the drive is using, TRIM could make almost no difference or a world of difference.
Anand explains it best:
"Only the Indilinx drives lose an appreciable amount of performance in the sequential write test, but they are the only drives to not lose any performance in the more real-world PCMark Vantage HDD suite. Although not displayed here, the overall PCMark Vantage score takes an even smaller hit on Indilinx drives. This could mean that in the real world, Indilinx drives stand to gain the least from TRIM support. This is possibly due to Indilinx using a largely static LBA mapping scheme; the only spare area is then the 6.25% outside of user space regardless of how used the drive is."
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
As OS X swings both ways.
Jews, also known as kikes, hebes, hymies, yids, gold niggers, oven magnets, hook noses, sheenies, swindlers, criminals, "firewood", and Arabs in denial are a subhuman species of reptilian extra-terrestrials and adherents to one of the world's oldest major religions, called "Judaism", otherwise known as "The Worship of Money" or "Eating Arab Babies".
Judaism was the world's first master race theory. The Jew religion teaches that Jews are the Chosen People of God and that there is a sacred mystical quality to Jew DNA. In olden times, Jew prophets would, under the command of YHWH, frequently lead the Jews on genocidal rampages against neighboring populations, and even today Jew leaders often cite Jewish religious ideals to justify their ongoing genocide of sandniggers. Judaism ironically found its mirror-image inversion in the anti-Jew Aryan racialism of the Nazis.
Despite only being 0.22% of the world's population, Jews control 99% of the world's money. Not only do the Jews control the world, but also the media, the banks, the space program, and LiveJournal's porn communities and Gay communities. All Jews possess the following features: an extremely large nose, fake boobs, curly hair that reeks of faggotry, one of those gay hats, a love of coke, a law practice, a roll of money, a small cock, or shitty taste in dental hygiene.
Jews invented both Communism and Capitalism. Karl Marx, of course, was a Jew, which was why he understood money so well, and in fact he was converted to Communism by another Jew, Moses Hess, the actual founder of Zionism, who ghost-wrote Marx's The German Ideology. Capitalism was created when Christian Europeans threw away their morals and decided to embrace Jewish practices like usury (see: John Calvin). Jews were the first group to create a sophisticated banking system, which they used to fund the Crusades in order to pit Christians and Muslims (both adhering to religions derived from and controlled by Jews) against each other to kill as many people as possible in a macabre human sacrifice to YHWH.
The Jew banking system was based on fraud and lies, so when it inevitably collapsed, the Jews just pwned as many people as possible by unleashing the Black Plague on them. Later, Jews economically controlled medieval Venice (the first modern maritime trade empire), and then crypto-Jewish merchants economically controlled the Spanish Empire, including the slave trade. Openly Jewish bankers orchestrated the Dutch Empire and founded Jew Amsterdam (later Jew York). Later the Dutch Jews moved to London because they thought it would be a better base for a global empire, and actually brought a Dutch nobleman, William III, with them, who they installed in a coup d'état (more like Jew d'état, amirite?) as new King of the British Empire. For hundreds of years, Jewish bankers controlled global trade through their bases in Jew York City and London. European colonialism was, through its history, essentially a plot whereby Jews could gain control of gold and diamond mines in poor countries and increase their stranglehold over the global economy.
Jews also enjoy slicing up baby penises for fun, some even enjoy sucking them. See below.
Jews also created Jew search engine Google, so now they can find all Jew information on Internets.
Some suggest that we should use Jews instead of dogs to sniff out large amounts of concealed cash or anything else worth smuggling at airports due to their sensitive Jew noses. Obviously, this is a horrible idea, because the pay is bad, and the dirty Kikes would probably form a union and demand moar money, thus increasing the burden on taxpayers everywhere.
Apple's description of the zeroing format method we used fits the description of what we wanted in terms of resetting the SSD to a clean state
Zeroing is not the same operation as TRIM. TRIM marks a block as unused, and if you read it you'll either get random data, or zeros (probably the later). Zeroing marks it as in-use, and if you read it you'll get zeros. The SSD's wear management algorithm will move the latter around as though it were real data, whereas it knows the former is "empty" so it won't bother (so the SSD will be faster). In other words, they don't seem to be using a "clean state" at all, which would explain why there's no difference.
Secondly, the SSD in the Macbook Air really isn't very fast at all
Which strengthens the hypothesis that they were comparing one "full" state with another. Pop out the drive, TRIM the whole disk in another OS, and run the benchmark again. It'll probably be a lot faster. It wouldn't surprise me if installing the Mac OS at the factory caused every block on the SSD to be used at least once (e.g. a whole disk image was written), which would mean you'd already be at the worse possible performance degradation.
The article writers made 2 major mistakes that cause their results to be meaningless.
1. They didn't secure erase the drive, which is what actually puts a drive back into a virgin state. They instead wrote zeroes to every sector, which means that the drive controller probably still thinks those zeroed out sectors are still in use.
2. The Samsung drive controller has a form of self cleanup that greatly reduces the need for TRIM.
3. Regardless, the SSD they used was slow as a dog and barely worth using over a HDD.
8am - Wakes up outside the Center for Marxist Education in Cambridge as another bum shits on him. Thinks this sucks and that he would like an apartment, but can't find a landlord with an apartment that is free as in speech and beer. Falls back asleep.
9am - Wakes up again.
9:15am - Goes to men's room at MIT to wash shit off. Gives himself sponge bath. Shit comes off (somewhat), but he really isn't clean since he refuses to take a shower.
9:45am - Decides to shave 2 inches off beard after someone in MIT restroom mistakes him for Osama Bin Laden.
10am - Goes to McDonalds for breakfast. Gets into arguement with workers behind counter after they refuse to give him a free as in speech and beer breakfast. Also gets into arguement with the manager about why McDonalds should be called GNU/McDonalds due to the fact that he eats there.
11:30am - After being thrown out of McDonalds since the staff doesn't want a DGH deterring lunch rush, RMS goes to the McDonalds' dumpster to find food. Eats a "GNU/Quarter Pounder" and "GNU/fries" covered with "GNU/mold". He consideres the food better since it is free as in speech and beer.
12:30am - Goes back to MIT to recruit MIT students into writing free software. RMS is unable to enter anyone's office since everyone has placed spider plants in their offices. (He has a phobia a spider plants.)
1pm - RMS protests GWB (George W. Bush) for not being GNU/GWB and believing in copyrights. Wanders out of Cambridge and into Waltham. Police find RMS and arrest him for violating the ordinance that says he is not allowed to enter Waltham. (All towns surrounding Cambridge have this ordinace.) Police beat him and deport him back to Cambridge.
3pm - Goes back to MIT and creates a plan for dealing with overpopulation by killing everyone who uses non-free software. Writes code into next version of emacs to implement that feature
5pm - Tries to read email. RMS finds out he is dangerously over quota due to an email from Doctress Neutopia. This email is 65 megabytes of nothing but ASCII text. It is similar to an email he gets everyday since 1995 when he and Docress Neutopia had a brief fling. The email says that she would like to have a relationship with him, but he needs to accept her lovoution, stop his polygamous goat fucking and clean off the hair, dirt, food, and feces off his keyboard. RMS responds with a 9 megabyte email (of nothing but text) explaining that he could only consider getting into a relationship with her if she changed her name to GNU/Doctress Neutopia.
5:30pm - Reads rest of his email. His email is bombarded with trolls and goatse. RMS is turned on by the goatse and beats off to it.
6pm - Still beating off to goatse
7pm - Still beating off to goatse
8pm - Still beating off to goatse
9pm - Breaks into MIT vending machine to have a free as in speech and beer snack.
10pm - Breaks into a liquor store for free as in speech and free as in beer beer. Gets drunk.
10:15pm - Walks around drunk yelling, "Use free software!!!!", "It's GNU/Linux you capitalist pigs!!!!" and "I am a goat fucker!!!!".
11:45pm - Collapses in front of the Center for Marxist Education. Goes to sleep.
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!
"Huh? Who's there? What--" Rob said, slurring his words.
Again he felt a tickling on his cheek and opened his eyes. He jerked his
head back.
"Motherfucker!" Rob yelled as his eyes went wide.
ESR's hairy erect penis, thin and crooked and pulsing with each heartbeat,
hovered centimeters from Rob's jaw. His bushy red pubic hair bearded his red
scrotum which hung low between his pale thighs.
"Hi Rob, I just got off the bus from Kansas City and decided to make a
pit-stop in Holland. Hope ya don't mind!" ESR said with a childlike grin.
His drooping orange mustache fluttered as his breath came in gasps.
"Motherfucker! I'll fucking kill you!" Rob shouted.
"Now now, Rob, that will never do. You'll suck my penis to erection and then
take it in your sweet little anus until it's time to dump a load of Uncle
Eric's special sauce down your slick throat, and you'll like it!" ESR said.
With this ESR cocked the hammer of his gun and pointed it at Rob's mouth and
began forcing his jaw open with the barrel as he poured the Jaegermeister,
thick and dark and brown, into Rob's mouth. He trickled some onto his bush
and penis for good measure and jammed his thin cock into Rob's mouth. Rob
took it to the hilt.
"That's a good little faggot. You take all of Uncle Eric's junk and you like
it!" Eric said as he began pumping his cock in and out of Rob's mouth. ESR's
bulbous white gut hovered menacingly over Rob's face like a full moon and
his ruddy pubes tickled Rob's nose. The gun barrel wavered at Rob's eyes.
Rob moaned as ESR grunted his pleasures into the back of Rob's throat.
"I have with me a funnel, Rob, and you're going to take it in your ass. This
old cock of mine needs a little lube and we're going to pack your rec-room
full of something quite slippery!" ESR said as his eyes grew wide. He shook
his bottle of Jaegermeister again as he helped Rob pull his pants off.
With a pop Eric removed his pulsating cock, slick with spit, from Rob's
hungry mouth as Rob turned over onto all fours, his back arched and ass
swaying in the air. ESR's little orange funnel entered Rob's anus without
complaint as he began pouring the brown fluid. Rob shivered.
"Good boy, Rob. Good boy. Uncle Eric's gonna feel real good in a second.
Oh!" ESR moaned as he rammed his dong home into Rob's familiar rectum.
"Reeeal goooood..."
"OK, Rob, I want you to say hello to my little friend!" ESR said with a .44 feel like up there, Rob?"
maniacal laugh. Rob hissed as he felt something cold and metal begin to
enter his asshole right beside ESR's rigid cock. "What's the barrel of my
"Get ready to take my load, boy!" Eric yelled as he jacked his crooked cock .44 focused on Rob's forehead as he began
into Rob's mouth. He kept his
pouring the brown liquor into Rob's mouth. A few drops of the spirit hit
ESR's dick and he lost control. His butt cheeks tightened and his hips
thrust forward and backward like a piston as his scrotum tightened.
"You little fucking Linux faggot, take my load!" ESR shouted at the top of
his lungs. Spurt after spurt of sickly yellow hacker semen erupted from
ESR's straining purple cockhead into Rob's gullet, the Jaeger splashing
Rob's face and mixing with the cum into an infernal homosexual cocktail. Rob
gagged and flailed his arms.
Rob laid gasping and spitting after ESR climbed off of his spent form.
"Thanks there, Robbie. Old Uncle Eric better get the fuck out of hear now
before the cops come. I'm sure someone heard you crying like a little girl!"
ESR said, laughing again.
0x01: ______________
0x02:< BSD IS DYING >
0x03: --------------
0x04: \ ^__^
0x05: \ (oo)\_______
0x06: (__)\ )\/\
0x07: ||----w |
0x08: || ||
0x09: Lameness filter encountred
0:0A: Reason : perl may be powerful, but it can't
0:0B: Be an operating system.
Think about snoodling with the Sarlaac pit. Read Slashdot. Masturbate to
anime. Email one of the editors hoping they will honor you with a reply. Join
several more dating services - this time, you dont check the (desired -
speaks english) and (desired - literate). You figure you might get a chance
then. Order some fucking crap from Think Geek. Get Linux to boot on a Black
And Decker Appliance. Wish you could afford a new computer. Argue that IDE
is better than SCSI because you cant afford SCSI. Make claims about how
Linux rules. Compile a kernel on your 486SX. Claim to hate windows but use
it for Everquest. Admire Ghyslain's courage in making that wonderful star
wars movie. Officially convert to the Jedi religion. Talk about how cool
Mega Tokyo is. Try and make sure you do your regular 50 story submissions to
Slashdot, all of which get rejected because people who arent fatter than
CowboyNeal can't submit. Fondle shrimpy penis while making a yoda voice and
saying, feel the force, padawan, feeel the foooorce, hurgm. Yes. Yes. When
900 years you reach, a dick half as big you will not have.
All in a days work with a yoda figurine rammed up your ass.
I HAVE A GREASED UP YODA DOLL SHOVED UP MY ASS!
It's the traditional Mac news in my eyes.
"You don't even have TRIM, we've had it for years. What's this platform?" /blindfolds on
"Look it's ok, without TRIM will still perform just as good as without because Mac OS X _is pure magic_ !!"
Let's try another one:
"Your antenna hardware has a design fault, signal drop very significantly when held with the left hand, dropping call or connection instantly" /blindfolds on
"Look it's ok, Apple said they'll make a software patch cause it's a _bar display issue_ signal doesn't really drop!"
Might be flamebait, but that's very much how it always sounds like to me :P Actually, it often sounds worse..
According to their tests, TRIM has a big impact on read speeds, yet according to their explanation, TRIM should only have a significant affect on write speeds.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I pledge Allegiance to the Doll
of the Greased Up States of Yodarica
and to the Republic for which it shoves,
one nation under Yoda, rectal intrusion,
with anal lube and ass grease for all.
With a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step, RMS slammed his sky-blue Chevette's rusted-out car door and turned on heel toward the MIT Zoo entrance. Today was a Sunday, and RMS had decided the daily stresses of Free Software, the GPL, and his crazy drug-smoking habits could go away for just one afternoon while he enjoyed the zoo.
"That'll be twenty-five dollars, sir," the lady at the admission booth said glumly. She looked at RMS expectantly.
"I was expecting this zoo to be Free," RMS stated loudly, eyes darting around to gauge onlookers' reactions. There were none: RMS's capital F had went unnoticed. "Can you ensure me that this money will not help fund -"
The admissions lady cut him off. "Twenty-five dollars, or twenty bucks with a Bawls can," the lady cut in.
With a grumble and shake of his beard, RMS handed over twenty five of his hard-earned dollars. Considering that the GPL works to unemploy programmers, one must wonder where this money came from.
By evening, RMS found himself in front of the penguin exhibit. He felt himself start to sweat, which would have been no surprise--his thick, full, grizzly beard was worth a thousand down comforters--except that he was wearing only a pair of nylon biking shorts and a travel pack around his waist. He stared at his hands. What was wrong?
"Awk" a nearby bird squawked. RMS wheeled in the direction the screech had come from. He was met with the steely, unfeeling stares of a penguin. "Awk! Ooooh God, the penguin said awk... Lord, lord lord, it's GNU/Linux. The penguin is Tux!!!" RMS blurted out. He felt dizzy, and cold sweat now washed over his brittle, hairy chest. He looked this way and that. From nearby a bird again squawked.
"Awk! Awk! Awwwwk!!!"
RMS ran as fast as his atrophied hippie-programmer legs could carry him, right through a gate and into an exhibit. He realized what he had done, and before he could turn around, he heard a low, ominous sound. Like the Devil's riding mower.
"Moooooooooooooooo!"
RMS gasped and darted his eyes around him as he stood deathly still.
"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
RMS was standing in the Gnu section, and it seemed these bull yaks were in rut and ready to mate with the first hairy thing with a hole in its center they found. Bad luck for RMS and his beard. Just then he felt cloven hooves push him down, and the world became fuzzy. RMS blacked out and remembered no more.
You know, I know that this sheep shit doesn't exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I've realized? Ignorance is bliss. But the funny part is, I'm not even in the matrix! It was reality!! I REALLY ATE SHEEP SHIT!!
i shit out an obama.
plop!
The thing about TRIM is that its to help the wear-leveling on the drive, not the data throughput performance (TRIM does nothing to guarantee consecutive blocks, etc....It actually would likely cause more fragmentation, because what the system sees as consecutive logical blocks could be reallocated several times on different portions of the disk, creating an extra layer of fragmentation that the OS isn't even aware of).
Even without TRIM you should expect similar performance characteristics until the cells in a specific region of the drive start to fail, because the drive doesn't know when its safe to reclaim blocks for the wear-leveling-- To have any wear leveling at all without TRIM the drive must actually set aside blocks, making it so that the user doesn't see all of the available space on the drive (when a block is rewritten, the drive can allocate a block elsewhere from the pool of free physical blocks, and then assign the old block to the pool of free blocks).
I fear the Y2038 bug
But you can't take the jungle out of a nigger!
All heil mein fuhrer Barrack Hussein Obama Homo Bin Laden
FTA: "We simulated this by copying 100GB of mixed files (OS files, multiple game installs, MP3s and larger video files ) to the SSD, deleting them, and then repeating the process ten times,"
Surely you should be deleting half the files - every other file - then rewriting them. If you copy a bunch of files then delete them all you're leaving the drive in pretty much the same state as it was at the start, the only difference between passes wil be due to the wear levelling algorithms inside the drive. Overall performance at the end will mostly be a result of the initial condition of the drive, not what happened during the test.
No sig today...
The HD in my Macbook Pro was failing and when I was shopping for parts, I noticed that PowerbookMedic (normally I'd just go buy a hard drive locally but I needed to replace the DVD drive as well so I figured why not just get it all in one go) had an SSD available at a reasonable price so I purchased it on the theory that whatever they were shipping was a decent fit for the Mac - they didn't have any maker info on the page but I figured that the only real difference between SSDs would be max bandwidth and anything would be an improvement over a regular HD so I didn't do any research. When it arrived it was a G.Skill drive (128GB).
When I first installed it things were very zippy and I was really happy. After about a month, though, things started to slow down and I started researching and found the SSD fragmentation problem that's been referenced often. Zero'ing out the unused space on the disk did give a bit of a performance boost, but not back to the original levels. Eventually things got so bad that I removed it and replaced it with a regular HD and things got much better.
So, a few points:
1) HFS+ is not magically aligned with SSD's somehow (the Macbook Pro is running Snow Leopard so it's got the latest OS updates). You can still hit the fragmentation problem.
2) A lot of people are saying that overwriting with zero's won't do anything. Any controller will detect a block of zero's as being unused data and just mark the block as such. It's not hard to do, it's an obvious thing to do, and even the worst controller out there has a boatload of firmware in it - they are not just bare flash RAM chips hooked to the ATA bus somehow.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
How are Mac users with Mercury Extreme SSD's or the Mushkin ect units doing?
They might be a bit different to the units Apple found at a set price point to max the profits.
Most of the Apple users sites seem to like the idea of a ~ TRIM via a removal of all data, zeroing and a copy back of the OS. Thanks
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
First of all, Apple HFS format family has been critized for using the exact same areas of disk (for B Trees, journal) eventually wearing them off. I didn't buy the claims until I noticed an external USB drive has couple of bad sectors on exact "metadata"/B-tree area. Another USB drive got wasted (actually converted to fat32) and I finally agreed to that claim. It is magnetic drive I talk about, on SSD things can really get ugly.
They could move the B-Trees and journal, actually advanced disk optimizers like iDefrag does it every time whenever it spots that they aren't close to beginning of drive but it seems they didn't even implement that basic counter measure. BTW; obvious but, nobody should "defrag" a SSD drive.
I was expecting they add such enhancements with the OS X version shipping with Macbook Air and yet, nothing happened. It is not bad as NTFS but, HFS+ has to have some workarounds for SSD.
Wonder if "We do ZFS, no it is target of patant trolls" period has something to do with it. No matter what people say, they were really serious about ZFS until Sun CEO stupidly leaked it and that company whined about their patents made them totally give up the idea.
Perhaps, something like UFS+ in future?
Slashdot is going down the crapper.
you cock-smoking faggots!
The problem is that a Flash based SSD needs to have a pool of unused blocks to work around the block-erase stupidity. However, trim only "solves" the problem when there is a good deal of free space on the drive anyway; when the drive nears full, it is useless. At the current pricing, people don't buy SSDs to keep them empty, and one would not expect an SSD to perform badly when full, as with rotating rust.
The solution is to provision enough extra blocks on the drive beyond the advertised capacity. While the vendors refuse to do this, you may do so yourself. Simply create an empty partition the drive--just make sure it isn't ever written or zeroed.
Anyway, the vendors' motivation to cut corners here should be perfectly clear.
Jes, I know the Intel MMU pages are either 4k or 4M. And people like "saving disk" since on average half a blocksize is wasted per file. But 4k is a tiny blocksize, set IIRC for newspools that few use. It only wastes 10 MB on a 5,000 file/dir system. That is not enough!
A 128 kB blocksize to match the hardware bs would "waste" a more reasonable 320 MB. Only 1% of the minimum 32 GB SSD.
while Microsoft and the SSD manufacturers have publicized its inclusion in Windows 7, Apple has been silent on whether OS X will support it
Isn't that kind of like comparing apple's and lemons?
windos cant boot from hpfs+ (or ext3 or reiserfs (3.6 or 4), or zfs or really anything new and high performance except for uh, ex(tra)fat, then again these filesystems might require acls or a layer to account for windos acls)
sure you could reformat it and install windows, but this would be unfair as we know the performance would suffer on writes to blocks that need to be erased before they can be written. another possibility would be a proper flash erase and then install windows to rule out some "hardware issue". so far the implication is that its the windows ntfs filesystem and (after the necessary testing) some linux filesystems that may be doing something differently to hpfs+.
. It wouldn't surprise me if installing the Mac OS at the factory caused every block on the SSD to be used at least once (e.g. a whole disk image was written), which would mean you'd already be at the worse possible performance degradation.
Disk images on the mac made by hdiutil (which is what Disk Utility is largely a front-end to) are almost always a copy based off files or just in-use blocks to a new image- the image is copied bit-by-bit back (for speed) and then the filesystem is expanded afterwards. This allows Apple to have one disk image, not one for each size hard drive shipped- and gives maximum speed (for magnetic drives.)
Please help metamoderate.
The question was asked in TFA comments whether or not OS X disk journaling was turned on. The question was not answered. It seems to me that this would have a profound effect on performance.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
OSX rulez! it will even get you laid, especially if you have an ssd :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coAep95p5kY
The Stallion
A full grown stallion's cock, when fully erect, will measure some two to
three feet long. It can be three to six inches thick at the base, to about
two inches thick at the head. Horses are somewhat different from other
animals in the way their cock head works. When a horse is fully erect and
excited and ready to mount, his cock head is somewhat pointed and not as
thick as might be normally observed. This is to facillatate an easier
entry into the mare. After the horse has entered and reaches a climax the
head swells (though it is more spongy then hard) into a fist sized mass as
he ejacultates. It is thought that this serves as a plug to force the
semen deep into the mare rather then allowing it to leak out. A full grown
stallion can ejaculate about one cup ( 8 ounces ) of semen. It will take
quite a few spurts to accomplish this. Each time his tail will raise and
lower in a brief flick. The first few jets are of a thin to average
consistency of cum. The final few jets are of a thick gelatinous
substance... it is thought that this serves to "seal" the mares pussy so
that the semen has time to do it's thing before leaking out. Horse semen
is extremely viscous, if you touch your finger to a pool of it you can draw
a thin string of it five to six feet long! Horse cum has a nice flat taste
to it...not at all bitter like man's cum. You can easily drink cups of it
with no discomfort.
The Mare - how to do it.
Mares can be quite satisfactory for the average well endowed male. If you
are somewhat less developed you might find better pleasure with a pony or
Miniature Horse. These are also better as they are lower to the ground. A
pony you can fuck standing up. A miniature horse on your knees or
squatting depending on the size. A mare will require something to stand on
or "platform shoes"...(IE mini stilts to raise you a foot off the ground)
so that you can reach her pussy.
Fucking any horse will depend on the horse. Some will be ready right
away...some will take coaxing. Pet the animal, talk to it softly, spend
time with it gaining it's trust. If something you are doing upsets it then
don't force it. Talk to it and calm it. If you work slowly you can make
an animal accept anything. It is just a question of helping it overcome
it's fears. All animals fear man if raised in the wild. How any animal
reacts will depend on it's own experiences. If you haved raised the animal
yourself in a loving enviroment, then you should have no problem
associating with it, if it is a strange animal that you have met in the
wild then you will have to go through an extended "courtship" to learn how
to respond to the beast.
MARES - TRAINING YOUR OWN
When the filly reaches weaning age, seperate her from her dam. If you have
limited time to spend then she should be put to pasture. If you have
plenty of time then you should keep her in a stall. Spend time with her
during the day petting and grooming her and allow her some time to run
free. Limit her access to other horses though and see that she spends at
least 8-12 hours a day in the stall. (Start with more free time and as she
approaches her first birthday confine her more...she is now at the right
age and her confinement will have made her so bored that she is amenable to
any new experience so long as it is not unpleasant)Young fillys have no
objection to someone playing with their pussy's. I have walked up on a pen
full of strange fillys at night and they came right up to me and I petted
them and felt up their pussys and they just lifted their tales and seemed
to enjoy it. These fillys didn't even know me but they were young,
inexperienced and bored...also since they were penned they were used to the
presence of people and did not fear me. Most horses in a large pasture
will run when they scent a strange human in their pasture at night.
If you sit on the ground and wait
All SSDs have a bit more storage than their rating. Partitioning a little less space on a vendor-fresh drive can double or triple the extra storage available to the SSD's internal wear leveling algorithms. For all intents and purposes this gives you the equivalent of TRIM without having to rely on the OS and filesystem supporting it. In fact, it could conceivably give you better performance than TRIM because you don't really know how efficient the TRIM implementation is in either the OS or the SSD. And because TRIM is a serialized command and cannot be run concurrently with read or write IOs. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to using TRIM properly. Systems are probably better off not using TRIM at all, frankly.
In case people haven't figured it out, this is one reason why Intel chose multiples of 40G for their low-end SSDs. Their 40G SSD competes against 32G SSDs from other vendors. Their 80G SSD competes against 64G SSDs from other vendors. You can choose nominal performance by utilizing 100% of the advertised space or you can choose to improve upon the already excellent Intel wear leveling algorithms simply by partitioning it for (e.g.) 32G instead of 40G.
We're already seeing well over 200TB in endurance from Intel's 40G drives partitioned for 32G. Intel lists the endurance for their 40G drives at 35TB. I'm afraid I don't have comparitive numbers for when all 40G is used but I am already very impressed when 32G is partitioned for use out of the 40G available.
Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to stress test a SSD and get results that are even remotely related to the real world, since saturated write bandwidth eventually causes erase stalls when the firmware can no longer catch up. In real-world operation write bandwidth is not pegged 100% of the time and the drive can pre-erase space. Testing this stuff takes months and months.
Also, please nobody try to compare USB sticks against real (SATA) SSDs. SSDs have real wear leveling algorithms and enough ram cache to do fairly efficient write combining. USB sticks have minimal wear leveling and basically no ram cache to deal with write combining.
-Matt
Yes, and as we know, solid state disks lose performance when files are fragmented, because, when the disk spins, err, i mean the electrons, the heat goes around, ah, fuck it.
Your reply was witty, but all of the EEs here on Slashdot will tell you that, for example, trying to write to random addresses in, for example, DDR2 memory when you could have written the same data to contiguous addresses, is a very bad idea. The only reason programmers don't feel this difference quite so much is that the cache hierarchy of the CPU is babying them.
Why haven't patches been made for all the major file systems so that they have am option to run "SSD mode"? In SSD mode the file system tells the SSD which blocks to erase. What is so diff?
Social Credit would solve everything...
There's a lot of misinformation in these comments, and parent actually seems to know what they're talking about...
TRIM is sooo outdated. With the new iTrim you can take care of your disk by simply shaking the notebook.
And if you don't belive it Steve WILL multitouch your retina.
They used the "write zero" disk erase method, which in fact un-erase every NAND block of the disk, which in turn forces the disk to erase each block again as it writes. Thats why they see such consistency of results : they are measuring the worst possible case where the disk is forced to the slow path for each block.
To erase NAND, you need to erase it by block, and the resulting block is full of 1's. Writing to NAND is a question of writing zeros in places, you can't write 1's on NAND unless you erase it.
So in a way, their test is showing that OSX is much, much better than windows when the disk is dirty, but that apple hasn't implemented the "trim" that allows the disk to re-erase nand 'free' blocks.
They didn't test it on a high performance platform. The Air is, unsurprisingly, optimized as a low battery usage mobile device. This implies a number of things, none of them good for trying to do high speed SSD testing. A more appropriate platform would be a Mac Pro, and perhaps look at adding on a high speed SATA card for good measure.
Now I can appreciate testing on a non-performance system too, but not if your objective is to test TRIM. In that case you need to be on a high end system so that the system isn't where things slow down, and difference will be due to the disk. Then, once you've established that, you can test if that difference matters to lower end computers.
I seem to recall osx or to be more precise hfs auto defragments a file when it is loaded. ie it loads a file then says "oooh messy" and writes it back in the background.
So the file second invisible write happens after the initial write time and in fact after a subsequent read time operation.
I wonder if osx is just doing things when it isn't being measured and files are constantly moving to spare gaps as a result.
(Someone must know more about hfs than my fuzzy memory to verify/refute this theory).
Definitely you can do that - the problem you run into is the tradeoff between block size and storage efficiency, because you lose space at the end of a block of data. And you care about it more on small expensive disks than on big cheap ones. Some file systems deal with this by having two different block sizes, the smaller one used for frags, but even so, the bigger the big block size, the more you lose.
However, I'd expect Apple to do a better job of tuning their file systems to the media type than Windows does.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I RTFA and at the END realized the IDIOTS had done a ZERO-FILL of the SSD (so clean tests on a DIRTY drive), then read through two pages of comments and saw many others who realized it too. Please pull this fkng waste of time off /. Too late to get my time back but maybe help someone else.
You're saying the "Samsung SSD doesn't degrade because it's initial performance is already so terrible"?!
That makes no sense at all. Think about it. Even if the drive was slow enough. out of the box, that a read operation took 10 seconds to complete, that should result in it being more like 20 or 30 seconds when the drive is all fragmented up.
Unless a drive had 0 performance (never returned a result when you did a read or write), it should be possible to measure it degrading in performance from a clean setup and a fragmented one....
A good joke all the way to the end, yet you missed a perfect opportunity to add an AYB reference, however old and dusty and outdated it might be.
A.D. 2101: War was beginning. Japanese-to-English translators found to be in particularly high demand.
http://www.gucciusaoutlet.net/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=75&zenid=aa7cf3c1c03ba16b9ac00c8cd2a23ef2