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Recent articles in Mac Rumors and Life Hacker (which actually reference this question on SU) say that using TRIM will prolong the life and increase the performance of an SSD.

I just got an OCZ Vertex 3 with the SandForce SF-2281 controller. Does this drive need TRIM support to operate at max performance? What about longevity? Isn't the built in Sandforce garbage collection enough?

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Edit for clarity:

I'm aware of the the various methods of enabling TRIM support on my MacBook Pro. The question is whether or not the new Sandforce Controllers need TRIM?

Community
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Chris_O
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2 Answers2

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Apple only supports TRIM on their own SSDs, but there are ways around this.

The AnandTech review of the OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 shows that, in the worst possible case of writing lots of incompressible data to the drive, there can be a substantial drop in performance without TRIM.

sblair
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Yes, you will get more out of the SSD enabling TRIM. Several people have experienced performance issues without it on OS X.

You don't need any firmware update to do this, but still OS X Snow Leopard doesn't have it built in yet (10.7 will however).

You can download TRIM Enabler which does exactly that. I've been running a Macbook Pro with an SSD for several months now using it, no problems at all.

slhck
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