05-09-2011, 12:59 PM

Hey guys, this forum has been very helpful for me learning my way around using Snow Leopard and my Mac in general. I was hoping you all could shed some light and clear up some confusion I am having. I have already installed a 64gb Crucial C300 SSD in my home build PC but now I would like to upgrade my mid 2010 13" Macbook Pro as well. I am going to put a Intel X25-M 160gb SSD in my Mac. For my PC Windows 7 took care of most of the tweaking for the SSD and of course supports TRIM. The only thing I really ran into with my PC build was I did not enable AHCI before installing Windows 7 and had to do another clean install to enable it. Before I do a clean install of Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro is there anything I should do to optimize performance? On my PC I got a big increase in performance going from IDE to AHCI. My googling has just got me confused about my Macbook Pro and Snow Leopard OS. Does Mac have a BIOS? lol Shows how little I know about Macs. Does Mac have AHCI mode? I know Snow Leopard does not have TRIM but does it have something to help with Garbage Collection? I will more than likely upgrade to Lion when it comes out so I can have TRIM on my Mac. Any tweaks or clarification will be strongly appreciated. If this topic has been beaten to death feel free to just post a link (I couldn't find my exact answers in my searches). Thanks in advance.

05-09-2011, 01:14 PM

Mac computers do not use a BIOS. They use the Intel derived EFI method of instruction for the machine. (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) You can find out more about that on Wikipedia. And there is no AHCI.

Any SSD you buy should work well in the MBP. Some SSDs are better than others so do your homework before buying. Right now the best SSDs are being sold by Other World Computing. You can see them here. Both MacWorld and MacLife magazines rate them very highly.

Also, there have been some interesting articles about TRIM regarding it's use in Windows 7 and OS X. OS X does a much better job of keeping the SSD clean without using TRIM. However, since TRIM will be supported in OS X Lion, that's a mute point.

05-09-2011, 02:04 PM

You have answered exactly what I was wanting to know. AHCI I don't need to worry about and Mac OS handles Garbage Collection fine. Thanks.