The IT Nerd

I got this question in my inbox overnight:

Hello from the United Kingdom! Where is it that you are going? I’m in Manchester and perhaps we can meet up for a pint if you’re close? But that’s not why I’ve e-mailed you. I’d like to ask a question if I may? Why did you not put an SSD into your MacBook Pro? Surely if you have had reliability issues, that would be the way to go? 

I eagerly await your reply. 

Thanks for the question and it’s a very good one. While it is true that Solid State Drive or SSD have no moving parts which should make them more reliable, and they have far more speed than a traditional drive, one thing kept me from making the move to a SSD. Apple has implemented a feature called TRIM in a way that stops me from buying one of these drives. To understand what TRIM is, I first need to explain how SSDs deal with deleted data.

When SSDs first started to become affordable, users began to notice after a while that the drive would slow when writing to the disk. That of course defeats the purpose of having an SSD in your computer. The cause was that the OS had no way of knowing if previously used space was free. So it would have to spend time to find free space which in turn caused the drive to slow down. Now there were tools that could fix that and more recent drives had their own ways of dealing with this problem, but some of the former would require you to delete all the data from the drive. That of course is impractical. The latter works for the most part, but there is still a speed penalty.

TRIM allows the OS to tell the SSD which parts of the SSD no longer contain valid data due to erases either by the user or operating system. This means that the SSD could write data faster because it didn’t have to figure out what parts of the drive are free and what wasn’t. 

Here’s the catch. OS X unlike Windows for example only enables TRIM support for Apple branded SSDs. If you buy a third party SSD, you have to use a hack of some sort to get TRIM support. TRIM Enabler for example is one such hack and it is not risk free. Even they say that it can affect your OS X install in negative ways. Knowing that, I did not want to trade one problem for another one. Thus, until Apple (who is behaving in a very anti-competitive way in my humble opinion), decides to let you use TRIM with any drive, this isn’t an option for me. Now there is a company who claims to have developed an SSD that works with the TRIM support in OS X. But you have to wonder how long it will take for Apple to shut that down either via a change in the OS or via a lawsuit. That’s also a risk not worth taking. Thus I went with a the Western Digital Black hard drive that I reviewed here. That was guaranteed to work.

By the way, I’ll be in the West Midlands this coming week. That’s not exactly close to you, but reach out to me if you want to go to a pub for a pint.

🙂

This entry was posted on November 17, 2014 at 7:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.