The latest MacBook Pros may reveal Apple’s plans for future support for SSD TRIM, a function of the operating system which tells the flash drive which blocks of data are unused and can be erased. Typically when a file is deleted by the user, space is flagged as not in use by the file system, but usually the actual blocks of data on the drive are not erased. When a new file needs to be written on the drive, the files are simply overwritten onto the space flagged as available. On a traditional hard drive, this is no different than writing to free sectors, but on a flash drive, the overwrite command requires much more time than writing to free space, and thus can be a potential performance bottleneck. The TRIM function effectively tells the SSD which blocks are not used, and the drive is able to actively clear out the space required, thus speeding up future writes to the disk.
While we know that the forthcoming OS X Lion will include support for TRIM, up to now it’s not been known whether that functionality would make its way into OS X Snow Leopard.
According to AppleInsider, the latest OS X 10.6.6 included in the new 2011 MacBook Pros features TRIM support. Hopefully this means that it will trickle down the next update for all users, but there is no official word from Apple as yet.
While it isn’t a feature that will benefit the majority of users, as an increasing number of MacBooks are shipped with SSDs, it’s good to know that Apple is working on removing performance bottlenecks wherever it can.
Article Via OSXDaily
