I installed a new 115GB SSD with a clean lion install in my MacBook pro (2010) with the data doubler containing my old seagate hdd.
The install took over five hours, which made me pretty suspicious to begin with.
But now I'm seeing why: every 30 seconds or so, whatever app is using the disk seems to completely freeze.
Examples:
Chrome accessing cache
App store downloading Xcode
Sublime text saving a file
Safari doing anything
Dropbox sync
I've turned off hard drive sleeping, which helped a bit but the benefits appear to be gone. I've also switched te hibernate mode to kill the image and disabled spotlight. The only general solutions google has suggested that I have yet to do are turn on TRIM (which OWC does not recommend for their drive) and add the noatime mount option.
I'm doing a permissions repair now, but I could use more suggestions.
Fs_usage and logs don't show anything that catches the eye.
Best Answer
I've got a OWC Mercury 115GB in my MacBook (2007) and encounter the same problem although never as severe as you describe. It was fairly frequent (multiple times an hour) while I was running FileVault2 but once I turned it off, it became much less frequent (perhaps once an hour). Normally, I see a complete freeze of the system, not just the application, for about 30 seconds.
SSD garbage collection seems like a likely suspect. In theory, the Sandforce controller plus the larger scratch pool on the OWC drive makes TRIM unneeded but if GC is the issue, maybe TRIM would reduce the frequency. That said, I read lots of reports of people seeing a similar problem when they hacked their system to support TRIM with 3rd-party SSD's under Snow Leopard. I stopped following the discussion when I upgraded to Lion so I don't know anything about current experiences.
I try to keep at least 30GB free.
5+ hours seems like a crazy long time to do a Lion install so maybe you have a different problem.