So, first things first, my mac is a hackintosh so my issue may be some weird issue due to that. However, I was wondering if what I'm experiencing is signs of ssd failure. I have a 128gb ssd in the rig for the os, applications and active projects. Over the past 2 months the drive has been slowly losing free space. I first chalked it up to filling it with projects but all of a sudden it has 100gb used so I check how big my projects and applications are and they are 30gb. I know the os isn't 70gb so I was wondering if this may be a sign of a failing ssd or if it may be something else.
MacOS – SSD on OSX Mountain Lion says it’s almost full but isn’t
macosssd
Related Solutions
Internet Recovery
If you installed the Internet Recovery firmware update, hold ⌘ cmd + ⌥ alt + R on boot to begin.
An image of OS X will be downloaded from the internet, and can be installed on the internal SSD normally. Once this is complete, you can restore your data from your external drive.
Try erasing free space (from Disk Utility, on the bottom left corner of the "erase" tab of your drive), and then enable trim (via Trim Enabler).
More than likely this drop in performance is caused by the SSD having to clear memory before being able to write to it. Flash memory can only bring bits up (from 0 to 1), meaning that over-writing a non-zero byte requires first erasing the whole byte, then bringing up whatever bits are needed. This means that 2 operations are needed (erase, write) rather than just 1 (write). TRIM helps improve performance by actively zeroing out memory locations that have been deleted during idle times, allowing for a single write operation to be sufficient for writing to that location. Erasing free space will do the same thing, but it's a one time deal, whereas TRIM works in the background to keep it all tidy.
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Best Answer
TRIM isn't enabled on non-Apple OEM SSDs in OSX. Perhaps garbage collection is not happening. You can find a lot of sites that explain how to enable TRIM in OSX. I haven't provided a link as they are plentiful and you may wish to use a site you're more comfortable with. Use keywords: "enable trim support OSX terminal"
This link explains it but you should not need the freeware tool that the article mentions. You can enable it from terminal with a few commands.