Should I enable TRIM in Crucial M500 SSD over Mavericks?

Question

I'm wondering what should I do with my Crucial M500 over my Macbook Pro with the last version of Mavericks.

I've read that enabling TRIM also slow down a bit the writting/reading speed of the hard drive, but that it is also needed in order to avoid problems when the drive is 80% used.

Some other people talk about the garbage collection saying that it should be enough.

I've been checking some topics such as this one but I don't have it very clear yet... it seems enabling TRIM can be a bit risky.

What would you guys suggest me to do? Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure you are going to find a definitive answer. I have a MBP 2012 with with a Samsung 840 500GB that I keep pretty full. Testing with Black Magic, drive performance had cratered (around 150/50MB/sec R/W). I installed Trim Enabler, filled the drive by creating an encrypted disk volume, deleted the volume, and waited a couple of minutes. Black Magic was back to normal. That was a couple of months ago. However, I just ran BM and the numbers are back to ugly (150/50 R/W). I'm running Filevault. So clearly TRIM and GC isn't enough to maintain performance over time in some configurations.

I also have 2009 MBP with an OWC 512GB w/o Trim enabled that is run with even less free space and the numbers today are as good as they were after initial install. So clearly GC is sufficient with some drives.

On the other hand, I didn't even notice that my notebook performance had regressed so unless you have an odd workload, maybe the answer doesn't make any practical difference in most cases.

Answer 2

I found an excellent article on Toms Hardware which led to my personal definitive answer. It's possibly the most concise and understandable explanation of trim, and led me to decide to turn trim on.

read here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-pro-ssd-trim,3538.html

A basic summary is this:

Hard drives don't know when a file is deleted so it continues to shuffle unnecessary data around wearing down hard drive use, and taking extra work by the controller.

Trim lets the hard drive know right away when a file is deleted so it doesn't have to manage the data anymore. This is how you get a speedup. It also sounds like the extra commands sent to the drive only happen upon file deletion, and the speed tests in the article seem to show the hard drive is sped up in general.

For me, it's pretty clear that I want to save wear on my drive, and have better performance, so I'm turning on trim for OSX Mavricks.