03-05-2011, 02:26 AM

Apple's MacBook Pros ship with active SSD TRIM support in Snow Leopard
AppleInsider | Apple's MacBook Pros ship with active SSD TRIM support in Snow Leopard

New MacBook Pro models are shipping with Mac OS X 10.6.6 (build 10J3210), which supplies TRIM support for bundled Apple Solid State Drives, enabling extended performance of the fast new devices via background maintenance.

03-06-2011, 08:18 PM

Cool. I am under the impression that TRIM is something vital to making SSDs work better and longer. Good times!

I think SSDs are nothing short of a revolution in computing hardware. I'm really excited about their potential.

If I understand their basic structure correctly, then would it be fair to guess that their existence might spell the end of RAM for computers eventually? That is, if an SSD gets as fast as RAM, it would kinda defeat the purpose of RAM?
Just a thought I had, could be way off, I'm not an engineer.

03-06-2011, 08:37 PM

Originally Posted by Chris1111

Cool. I am under the impression that TRIM is something vital to making SSDs work better and longer. Good times!

I think SSDs are nothing short of a revolution in computing hardware. I'm really excited about their potential.

If I understand their basic structure correctly, then would it be fair to guess that their existence might spell the end of RAM for computers eventually? That is, if an SSD gets as fast as RAM, it would kinda defeat the purpose of RAM?
Just a thought I had, could be way off, I'm not an engineer.

While SSD's will almost certainly become more and more pervasive - especially as they improve and the price comes down - I don't think it will sound the death knell for RAM any time soon. I understand how you could reach that conclusion though. Unfortunately, they serve completely different purposes and more importantly, the way the memory is accessed (register reads/writes) is completely different, not to mention the fact that RAM (DRAM) is much faster than the NAND based flash used in current SSDs. Also - SSD's use non-volatile memory while your RAM is volatile.

03-06-2011, 08:45 PM

Ah ok. Thanks for the info.

On a practical and current level I'm content with observing how they are growing bigger and being integrated into iMacs.

I'm eagerly awaiting any refresh they do to the iMac line and wondering how and if ssd will play into it.

03-06-2011, 08:49 PM

One wonders if TRIM is that important to Snow Leopard., Have a read of this link, particularly page 7 on the analysis.

Mac SSD performance and TRIM in OSX | bit-tech.net


10,000RPM Raptor drives were going to see off 5,400RPM drives but it never happened.