Hacker News Reader

For those curious as to why performance will degrade quicker on OS X:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

Just had to look that up myself. Shocking that OS X doesn't support it natively, although the article suggests there may be utilities that can replace that functionality.

View on HN

Intel X-25M has TRIM support in the controller itself, and thats the way it should be I believe

The drive does not know when data stored on the drive is “deleted”. This is what TRIM is for, i.e. when you delete a file you just unlink the inode. You need to tell the drive that the blocks that the file occupied are no longer needed, so the disk can ignore that data when reorganizing or later rewriting part of the block.

Unfortunately while there are strategies to mitigate the problem in hardware, proper TRIM support is still best. You might be getting confused by the TRIM enabled firmware that was released in December '09 for that SSD? It just means that the Intel drive will obey TRIM commands from the OS. But if the OS doesn't send any commands, which OS X won't, then you're not taking advantage of TRIM. For what it's worth, if you were going to choose a drive that would degrade the least in performance without the use of TRIM, you probably chose best with the Intel X-25M. But it would still perform better over time in Linux or Windows 7.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com