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SSDs on OSX

C

cleifperry

Junior Member
I've looked through these forums and others on the web, but haven't found a satisfactory answer to a question:

Does the "Erase Free Space" option in Disk Utility, which writes zeros to the free space on your hard drive, alleviate the need for a wipe utility or Trim function with SSDs on Snow Leopard?

I've been using an Apple sold SSD (256GB Toshiba brand) for over a year now. It's speedy and I haven't noticed a lack of performance, but I haven't benchmarked it (since I bought it) either. I have, however, run the Erase Free Space option a few times. Anyway, just curious, since the big concern with SSDs is the ability to restore sectors to a deleted state (ie the "Garbage Collection").

Any thoughts?

Thanks.
 
Last edited:
Hi cleifperry
Writing "zero" to free space on an SSD is worst thing you can do. It is equivalent to filling every single block on the SSD, which then means every block has to be erased before it can be written too again.
 
Hmm... Sounds like "worst thing you can do" is a bit of a myth/mis-judgment to me: Not only have I seen no loss in performance in over a year's worth of use, but I just ran Xbench and it benchmarks exactly as it did when I bought it a year ago.
 
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