MacOS – Yosemite and SSD Trim incompatibility

In the end I went with the most expensive but also the fastest option: #1 which was the Mercury Accelsior PCIe based SSD hardware RAID array (RAID 0 by default which I will keep) in a Mercury Helios Thunderbolt PCIe chassis. The main reason was because it was the only one that mentioned it was bootable (and made a big deal out of that fact).

I paid $799 for the 240 GB model (it's 128 GB X 2 minus the unusable amount...a nice touch for the seller not to count that). It's got a lot of technology built into the card including processors and cache etc. to monitor and control the hardware RAID array including extra error checking and load leveling/balancing. Also it's theoretically upgradable (each drive is called a "blade" and while they don't yet sell independent blades they may in the future). Also the PCIe chassis is an extra bit of the investment that could live beyond the SSD, just like the whole arrangement could live beyond the use of my iMac itself.

This is a great review on it where they say it's "really fast. Ridiculously fast."

A guy on youtube has a (somewhat boring) video of his Mac Pro taking 3 minutes to boot and launch paint shop pro with his hard drive and then after setting up one of these it cut down to 15 seconds! Crazy balls out fast.

This is the sellers sites for;

• The Thunderbolt PCIe Chassis

• The SSD RAID array

• And the bundled special of the two

Of note is that if they didn't offer the bundle discount and if it were not so much more expensive I might have opted for this much more attractive chassis.

Or for even more and larger chassis with multiple slots and supporting larger sized cards.

These chassis got me thinking about the possibilities with thunderbolt. Now any iMac or MacBook can be as capable and expandable as a Mac Pro...there are even developments with video cards in one of these things! I do wonder if it would be possible to take a MacBook Air and hook up a thunderbolt PCIe chassis with a high end graphics card with the display on the internal monitor?

If I was one of these manufacturers, or even Apple, I would consider making a full on chassis with PCIe slots and storage areas, etc. I really wanted a Mac Pro but they were so old...now I can get some of that goodness piecemeal, though for a price. :-)

I get the device about a week from now and will post back my impressions if anyone is interested.

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.