Question: SSDs have been out for a few years, and have seen all kinds of usage patterns. ?Windows and Linux support the TRIM command, with Mac OS still trailing behind here. ?Update (2011): It appears OSX Snow Leopard has support for TRIM in Apple-branded SSDs. ?There is a utility that enables TRIM in non-Apple SSDs
I’m sure plenty of Mac users (and pre-TRIM version of Win/Linux) have SSDs. ?So, to you folks: have you noticed a degradation of SSD performance during its lifetime? ?How long have you been using the SSD, and how bad is the degradation?
I’m assuming that even at its most degraded state, a modern SSD would still smoke a traditional hard drive in terms of performance.
Answer: I have a OCZ Summit SSD in my work laptop running Win7 x64. ?I had installed the drive just prior to the firmware update that enabled TRIM so I was running for a long time with no TRIM. ?I noticed some pretty substantial performance problems after a few months. ?It became unbearable when, after installing an Apple bluetooth mouse, the cursor would occasionally pause while compiling a large project within Visual Studio 2010. ?(Also my compile time for this project was then around 20 seconds, up from 13 seconds when the drive was installed initially – though more classes and projects had been added so maybe not the best indicator.)
I backed everything up to my Windows Home Server, updated the firmware (it clears the disk which is why I didn’t perform the update prior), restored from backup and performance hasn’t been an issue for the past two months since I’ve done this. ?(And back down to around 13 seconds for a full compile for the same project.)
So in my experience there is a definite noticeable performance hit over time. ?This is the reason why I have not yet replaced the HDD in my MacBook Pro with an SSD.