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OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked
An anonymous reader writes "OS X 10.8 has been benchmarked against Ubuntu Linux with some interesting results. From the tests on a Apple Mac Mini and Apple MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion was clearly superior when it came to the graphics performance, but the rest of the time the operating systems performed quite closely with no clear winner. OS X also seems to have greater performance issues with solid-state drives than Linux."
Hope you mean TRIM and not defragmenting, which occurs when a file is deleted on an SSD, not when one is written.
No, TRIM is not defragmenting. TRIM only occurs on SSD and is a result of how FLASH has to be written/erased.
Traditional storage devices have storage elements with only two states - 1 or 0. These elements are then written to and read by the OS. SSDs are different as their storage elements have the same two states - 1 or 0, but also have an "empty" flag. You see, to write to a storage element that is not empty requires a rather lengthy erase procedure to be performed before the write. So to speed things up, SSDs maintain an "empty" status.
But how does an SSD know when a storage element is empty? When a file is deleted all that happens is the FAT table is changed - the actual data does not get deleted. Over time, all available blocks in an SSD get marked as "not-empty" and that lengthy erase procedure is required all the time. This is where TRIM comes in, it allows for the OS to give the SSD hints by telling it certain blocks are in fact empty. The SSD can then pre-erase these blocks to ensure speedy future write operations.
So that is TRIM - defragmenting is something else entirely. Look it up, it's basic stuff. But because SSDs do not offer truly random access, there is an advantage in having the file system defragmented. How much of an advantage is what I would like to know. If I had to guess I would say minimal.