Love Apple gear? Like math? TUAW’s Doing the Math series examines the numbers and the science that lie behind the hardware.
One of the new features we first saw in the developer beta of Mac OS X Lion back in February is long-overdue in this correspondent’s humble opinion: it finally supports TRIM on solid-state drives.
TRIM (which, despite the capital letters, isn’t an acronym) is a way to speed up SSD access by performing important housekeeping tasks in the background or on file deletes, rather than leaving it until the user is writing data to the drive. Since then, TRIM has also appeared in 10.6.6 for new Macs with Apple-supplied SSDs only, and with third-party tools, it’s now possible to get TRIM running on any SSD under 10.6.7.
This raises the question: what exactly is TRIM, and why does it matter? If you’ve been wondering what this seemingly arbitrary abbreviation is, and why it matters, then I’m here with my best Science Hat on to remove all that wonder (as we scientists so often do) and replace it with cold hard fact.
Continue reading Keeping SSDs in TRIM: doing the math
Keeping SSDs in TRIM: doing the math originally appeared on TUAW on Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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