“One item of interest regarding last week’s Mac OS X 10.6.8 update reveals that Apple has enabled TRIM support retroactively for solid state hard drives shipped in Apple-produced configurations,” Eric Slivka reports for MacRumors.
“TRIM is a feature that allows solid state drives (SSDs) to automatically handle garbage collection, cleaning up unused blocks of data and preparing them for rewriting, thereby preventing slowdowns that would otherwise occur over time as garbage data accumulates,” Slivka reports. “The new native TRIM support does appear to limited to stock Apple drives, as users who have installed third-party SSDs into their machines have reported that TRIM is not enabled by the update… (The new MacBook Pros released in February shipped with a special build of Mac OS X 10.6.6 that included TRIM support for Apple SSDs. But that TRIM support had not been extended to all SSD-configurable Macs until the release of Mac OS X 10.6.8 last week.)”
Slivka reports, “Mac OS X 10.6.8 also appears to have brought graphics improvements that have been most apparent to gamers. According to one set of benchmarks, Mac OS X 10.6.8 outperforms Mac OS X 10.6.7 in many measure of graphics performance, sometimes by a significant margin.”
Read more in the full article, which includes benchmarks, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
As much as I love Apple products, things like this every now and then make it really lame for Apple consumers who upgrade post-purchase, with a better quality SSD. I hope someone posts instructions on how to manually enable it for all SSDs so that my iMac can also make full use of it, not just from the hard-wired garbage collection of the SSD itself but on the software level as well.
It probably has more to do with having control of the type of SSD used with this feature. Apple can fully test the feature with their known OEM parts, and be confident that the feature will not cause unforeseen data loss or corruption.
If you use a modern SSD that has a Sandforce controller, TRIM is largely irrelevant, as garbage collection and other maintenance routines are built-in. It’s mainly the previous generations of SSDs that really need TRIM.
the graphics performance improvement is real: the animation of a grid view jumping out of a docked folder is smooth again, as with 10.6.6. It had been a bit jerkey with 10.6.7.
(late 2010 MBA 13″)
Trim Enabler
Live it
Learn it
Love it
Trim. Yummy. 😉
@ iRobot
Enjoy:: http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/27/enable-trim-ssd-mac-os-x-10-6-7/
Thanks! Does it work with 10.6.8 too?
Or just get an SSD from OWC — Garbage collection (TRIM) done internally!
Only about 3-4 years behind Microsoft. How can the one manufacturer that pushes SSD technology be so behind the curve on this essential feature?
I think it could be proof that the Apple engineers don’t appreciate Trim as much as we’d hope.
I bet there is going to be a graphics driver update very soon.
I have update to 10.6.8 and noted that dark colors in movies has degraded significantly. Every time there is a nigh or poor light condition image looks like burn or pixelated or like 8 bit color. Or is it just my computer? I have iMac 8,1 with radeon 2400 128Mb ram. Has any body else experimented this issue?
Sorry, problem was a setting on the HD TV (the brightness) , not the Mac. My apologizes to all 🙂
Both my 2009 MBA with 64GB SSD and my 2010 MBA with 128GB SSD all original Apple SSD’s are NOT SUPPORTED BY TRIM after upgrading to 10.6.8…..So the statement “TRIM support for all Apple SSD’s” is simply no true.
Trim Enabler
This works on stock Apple SSDs
I have a MBA 1.8ghz/66gig stock Apple SSD and trim Enabler works on it. You will need to reinstall after each OS update i.e. 10.6.8. Erased it so i had to reapply. You will notice an immediate difference from the first time you reboot after the install.