Tom’s hardware puts a number of solid-state-drives through their paces, lays it all out for you.
Best SSDs for the money
Tom’s hardware puts a number of solid-state-drives through their paces, lays it all out for you.
So I feel like I’ve seen articles saying that Yosemite doesn’t like third party SSD’s and breaks TRIM support for them. However, OWC claims their SSD’s are safe with Yosemite. So what is the deal exactly? Are these recommended SSD’s Yosemite ready? Sorry, I’m not enough of a techie to understand these things!
Yosemite now requires that kernel extensions (kexts, aka drivers) be cryptographically signed. This prevents kexts from being patched. The normal technique for getting TRIM to work with third party SSDs on OS X is to patch the driver to recognize the third party drive as an Apple SSD. The kext signing requirement prohibits this technique. Fortunately, there’s a flag that can be set at boot time that will disable the kext signing requirement. This flag is primarily intended for development purposes, but it also works well to re-enable patching the Apple kext to allow third party SSDs to use TRIM. If you use the latest version of TRIM Enabler from Cindori, they’ll set the boot flag automatically.
Thank you. It seems scary to me that to get a third party SSD to work properly in a Mac, that we are at the mercy of a third party utility being updated. Is that not worrisome?
All SSDs do internal “garbage collection” (GC). This is probably what OWC and others are referring to when they say their drives are ready for Yosemite. GC is something done internally to the SSD, with no operating system involvement. Some people claim that GC is sufficient without TRIM. But the way TRIM and GC work make the two complementary. TRIM helps GC work more effectively, minimizing writes to the SSD and thereby extending the useful life of your SSD. TRIM is not essential for the operation of an SSD, but it is very useful. I’m sure that SSD controller manufacturers are doing very clever things with GC, but I’m not aware of any GC implementations (since they’re all very proprietary) that completely obviate the benefits of TRIM.
To see the benefits of having trim enabled in high end SSD Drives check the graphics in this page http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-850-pro-ssd-performance,3861-8.html
You’ll see that they are actually faster without Trim enabled and if you use it in a MacBook Pro the consumption of power is much lower without Trim (more battery life).
I guess when you get to today’s top of the line high capacity SSDs; the benefits of Trim are at least debatable.
I’m using a OWC SSD in my 2010 MBP while running Yosemite. There are no problems at all.
Thank you for the thorough reply!