A couple of unresolved questions regarding SSDs.

I have been trying to do as much research and gain as much insight as I could about SSD's before buying one for myself but there are a few questions that I still cant figure out. I will try and briefly outline what I generally understand (correct me if I am wrong) then I will ask my questions.

OWC seems to be the most mac friendly ssd available other then apple branded ssd's. Intel (x-25) seems to have the lowest failure rates. There is a limited amount of write cycles the ssd drives, 25nm versions being even lower (possibly compensated by controller). Newer generation ssds have minor performance improvements over the previous versions (intel 510, c400/m4, vertex 3 -not 256gb version), and some of these performance issues are due to reducing production costs (vertex 3 128gb version). Total projected life span is about 8 years or so. In many ssds there are sleep problems (mostly sandforce controllers? and this is caused by firmware problems?).

Question:
1. Do people use a second hdd in optidrive simply for increased storage or is it preserve the longevity of their ssd? I guess whats the benefits/costs of doing this (more power consumption, taking out disk drive, ssd longevity preservation, boot times, higher storage, etc.)

2. I also plan to enable TRIM in 10.6.7 through the recent patch (cant wait for Lion) and just wanted to make sure that it did in fact support 3rd party ssd's, since I dont want to run an ssd without TRIM (haven't seen actual confirmation other then the picture of "yes" in system profiler).

Note: I plan to buy a c300 128gb for my Late 2009 Macbook Pro (2.26Ghz, 8gb Ram @ 1067) but I really want to use the drive as the primary and only drive in my macbook. I want to know if there is consequence to using my ssd as a primary drive other then it losing my data over the 8 year period. I don't ever have over 100gb in my hard drives, dont write much data other then notes for classes on a daily basis, and naturally use an external for bigger less used data files (movies, application packages). If you can help me out I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Could well be TRIM is not as important as first thought. Have a read of this:-

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

Reports are Lion will support TRIM.

Use a Mercury Extreme SSD as primary drive, no problems and it flies. No sleep problems in a Mac Pro.

I use an optibay for cost reasons: When I bought my SSD, the 60GB model was fairly affordable and the next step up (120GB) was substantially more.

And neither of those was large enough for all the data on my current 250GB harddrive.
So I went with a DVD drive bay replacement and the smaller SSD. Application performance is just as good (I only have music and photos on the old harddrive) and I don't miss having the DVD drive at all (I have an external USB drive should I ever need it).

I have TRIM enabled on my Intel SSD in my work MacBook, but haven't bothered doing it yet at home (Lion is just around the corner anyway).

I wouldn't worry too much about minor speed differences - just get one of the well-known brands and go with something relatively recent (last year or so) that is right for your budget.

Thanks for your responses guys. As an update I ended up getting the 128gb c300 and am loving it (NO sleep problems or weird SATA link of 1.5gigabits instead of 3gigabit). My system is 5,5 late 2009 13" macbook pro (2.26ghz, upgraded 8gb ram). I would just like to recap how I went about installing it for people that might want to know because I know it could be kind of hard to get straightforward instructions.

1. put c300 (ssd) in an external usb enclosure and format it to mac os extended journaled
2. check firmware and update if needed (it is written on the ssd its self, and mine was the latest version 006)
3. I chose to clone my previous hard drive, so I ran superduper! which took about an hour and a half.
4. removed c300 from external enclosure and installed it into the computer after taking the old HDD out.
5. Started up perfect
6. Reset PRAM for a potentially quick boot up
7. Enabled TRIM (groths.org » Blog Archive » TRIM Enabler for Mac)

Thats it!
This site helped me out also
Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done

Somethings looking into to reduce writing to ssd:

1. moving firefoxes cache to RAM instead of the ssd (FireFox Cache in RAM? • mozillaZine Forums)

2. Using an application like Smartsleep to turn off hibernation (Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - SmartSleep), which is very write heavy.

I tried the TRIM patch on my MBP with c300 256G. Xbench showed approximately a 50% decrease in speed. I removed the patch, and everything was normal again. The c300 package says, "Active garbage collection" installed onboard the ssd firmware. I can only assume that this ssd has its own TRIM built-in. This c300 works perfectly right out of the box, and any tweaks or adjustments either has no effect or will decrease performance for me.

I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that TRIM is needed on a MBP. Maybe thats why Apple has chosen to ignore it so far? Anyway, I'm going by the old axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" for now.

Comments of fact are welcome.

OWC where my SSD came from were very insistent that the SSD not be cloned from the existing 7200 RPM drive, rather a clean install and then use Migration Assistant to transfer applications and anything else wanted over. Something to do with copying slower platter operations.

You will have a 'leg-up' if there is any slow down.

Hmm... Don't remember the c300 saying anything about that. I loaded my new ssd from a clone and it works fine.

That is fine. If you do a Google of 'cloning Crucial C300' quite a bit of comment on fresh install. If no problems all well and good.