things to do on installing an SSD

[studer58]

I'm new to Macs, so forgive my simple questions !

I'm running Reaper on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) on a mid 2010 core i5 2.4 Ghz Macbook Pro, with 4 GB RAM. Audio interface is Audiofire 8. It's an old OSX, but it works happily with this interface. I do no other work on this laptop....no internet, gaming, word processing etc...just location recording.

For these purposes it works fine, although I recently swapped the ageing internal 5400 HDD for a Samsung 120GB SSD. I've installed Trim Enabler because 10.6.8 doesn't activate Trim on non-Apple SSD's

I'm planning to record projects directly to the SSD, I know it's perhaps not advisable and most folks just put their OS alone on the SSD, and record to an external, but my projects are going to be very small.

My main questioning relates to the need (or not) to assign a partition/volume for over-provisioning. In Windows this is usually recommended to be 10% of the SSD size and allows for the 'garbage collection' and restoration of disk space. Is the same recommended in Macs, and if so how would I go about creating such a partition ?

Thank you for your advice, and any other info relating to house-keeping for a newly installed SSD

[serr]

You've been misinformed. The free space on your SSD will be your high performance audio workspace. For large projects or jobs like recording multitrack while mixing the live show you absolutely want to record to a SSD!

There's no need to make a separate partition either.

What happened is someone played "telephone game" with the old advice for HDD's of using multiple drives for OS vs. data and so forth. A single SSD will outperform that by a large margin. Adding a 2nd SSD would be a moot point unless you were shuttling data around for something way beyond audio work (like raw 4k video editing).

It's recommended to leave around 10GB free space on a system drive for any OS.

I don't have an opinion on the trim business. Apple disables it by default for 3rd party drives because they don't trust that the drives have been qualified for using it. Recommendations are 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. I've left it turned off (I always buy my own drives) and I see zero performance hit. Unless the premise was to get better than factory spec performance using this but I've never seen that specific claim.

[studer58]

Thank you serr, I've often thought that Trim in modern drives is a questionable thing....maybe I'll turn it off fora mix project and see if there's any performance hit compared with leaving it on. I suspect the 'garbage collection'which is inbult into drives does most of the reallocation heavy lifting ?.

I'll remove that partition, and instead keep a watch over the total free space, moving data out to another drive as it fills.

[Patrice Brousseau]

Originally Posted by studer58

Thank you serr, I've often thought that Trim in modern drives is a questionable thing....maybe I'll turn it off fora mix project and see if there's any performance hit compared with leaving it on. I suspect the 'garbage collection'which is inbult into drives does most of the reallocation heavy lifting ?.

I'll remove that partition, and instead keep a watch over the total free space, moving data out to another drive as it fills.

It's better to have some overprovisioning space (in my case, I let 5-7% unformatted) but with such a small SSD, it would mean a loss of around 10 GB... And no, TRIM is beneficial if you want to keep a good performance as the drive gets data written, erased, written and so on.

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-ne...an-ssd-primer/

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2088...rformance.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...im,3538-5.html

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Crucial...nt/ta-p/100276

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...ed-trim-right/

And here's an obvious case of an SSD losing speed because TRIM wasn't enabled: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...-imac.2053041/