OSX 10.7 Lion... TRIM support... Retina Display support, and more

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http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/26/mac-os-x-lion-has-trim-support-for-ssds-hidpi-resolutions-for-i/

Well, for a company that has effectively always proclaimed (even when they're not proclaiming it outright) they're innovators and on the bleeding edge, it only took 'em what, several years to get around to adding TRIM support which will sure help quite a bit.

Retina Display support I'm not to buzzed about, and the rest ain't all that (to me, that is), but the TRIM support is a fairly big deal if it pans out.
 
Meh. Garbage collection on disks works well enough until we get TRIM. I don't see this as a fatal flaw in OSX by any means.
 
TRIM is slightly overrated simply because it’s absent from OS X. And by the way, it’s not actually in Lion, or at least the evidence offered isn’t proof. The exact same prompt appears in Snow Leopard. It’s a check as to whether or not the SSD supports TRIM, not a confirmation as to whether or not the OS supports/uses TRIM.

The High DPI mode stuff is new, though, and far more important than TRIM. Resolution independence has been sort of half-baked into OS X since Tiger. Looks like Apple is ditching the concept and just going with the easier path of pixel doubling. Acceptable compromise, IMO.
 
^ Except, if I get a 13in laptop with 2560x1600 resolution, I'm sure as hell going to want to see a larger view than just what I would get with 1280x800. Granted, I wouldn't want it to be the same as a typical 30in monitor, but something close to 1680x1050 or 1440x900 in terms of view size would be ideal.
 
orangeblue said:
^ Except, if I get a 13in laptop with 2560x1600 resolution, I'm sure as hell going to want to see a larger view than just what I would get with 1280x800. Granted, I wouldn't want it to be the same as a typical 30in monitor, but something close to 1680x1050 or 1440x900 in terms of view size would be ideal.
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Then you’re in the market for another notebook.
 
TRIM was introduced into operating systems after Snow Leopard came out. Machines like the Macbook Air make up for this by using Toshiba SSDs, which at the expense of drive life have aggressive garbage collection. Several other SSD controllers make TRIM redundant by doing the same thing.

Blame it on bad timing or whatever, but TRIM is going to be in the next major revision.

As for higher pixel density desktop displays, I'm for it. The iPhone 4 display has text that is finer than you see on a printed page. I already love the higher than standard DPI you get with the newer 2560x1440 LCDs out there. The only downside would be gaming, as it would require quite the beefy GPU. I'm using SLI cards for my 2560x1440, and its the only reason I'm going so heavy with that power. Being able to drive a desktop display at double the pixel density of today's LCDs would be incredible, but it'll take a couple years for GPUs to catch up.
 
Serpico said:
As for higher pixel density desktop displays, I'm for it. The iPhone 4 display has text that is finer than you see on a printed page. I already love the higher than standard DPI you get with the newer 2560x1440 LCDs out there. The only downside would be gaming, as it would require quite the beefy GPU. I'm using SLI cards for my 2560x1440, and its the only reason I'm going so heavy with that power. Being able to drive a desktop display at double the pixel density of today's LCDs would be incredible, but it'll take a couple years for GPUs to catch up.
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If they come out with a mac book air with a screen of the same dpi as the iphone I will buy my first mac product!(if it's under $1500) (I had an old mac beige pc but that doesnt count) .
 
munkle said:
If they come out with a mac book air with a screen of the same dpi as the iphone I will buy my first mac product!(if it's under $1500) (I had an old mac beige pc but that doesnt count) .
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and if it comes with a 5 year warranty, 2 year return policy and if it weighs less than 1.5 pounds, and if it has a graphics card that I can game on, oh, and 3D without glasses.

seriously, just get one. I'm on my 5th Apple laptop, and they all have been stellar. The all have a tremendous usable lifetimes. I just placed an order for the new MBP 13 (my 5th) and it is replacing a 15 inch MBP from 2007.

Before some one does the math, the laptops are for me and my wife (we have our own).
 
I have been a mac house since 04' and have had the following mac products. All have been excellent
white 13" macbook
black 13" macbook
white 13" macbook (gf)
white 13" macbook (work)
aluminum 13" macbook (gf)
late 2010 13" macbook air (work)

I would not hesitate to purchase a new air if they bring a higher resolution screen or newer cpu.

Either way I will be upgrading to lion when its released.
late 2010 11" macbook air
 
Interested because I'm wondering what they are planning with the screens.

Still find it really funny that apples preview pages advertises full screen apps as a major feature. Laugh every time I read it.

I will say it looks like apple is doing something similar to volume shadow copy in the new version. This has been a killer feature on windows for a while and I'm looking forward to a nice version on mac os.
 
swatbat said:
Still find it really funny that apples preview pages advertises full screen apps as a major feature. Laugh every time I read it.
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It’s a new display mode, therefore a new feature, therefore worthy of serious coverage. Notebook users are primary benefactors.

I will say it looks like apple is doing something similar to volume shadow copy in the new version.
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You are referring to…?
 
Mindflux said:
He's referring to the 'versioning' feature. It works in the same way as VSS in the fact you can "go back" to a previous version right on the live filesystem.
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Yep. Volume shadow copy is setup on all of are servers and has made it so I haven't had to go to a backup short of a raid going down in a long time when someone deletes a file.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

From that site.

Versions records the evolution of a document as you create it. Mac OS X Lion automatically creates a version of the document each time you open it and every hour while you’re working on it. If you need to revert to an older version or retrieve part of a document, Versions shows you the current document next to a cascade of previous versions — in an interface similar to that of Time Machine — so you can see how your work looked at any given time. You can revert with a click, or quickly copy and paste work from a previous version into the current version.*
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Terpfen said:
TRIM is slightly overrated simply because it’s absent from OS X. And by the way, it’s not actually in Lion, or at least the evidence offered isn’t proof. The exact same prompt appears in Snow Leopard. It’s a check as to whether or not the SSD supports TRIM, not a confirmation as to whether or not the OS supports/uses TRIM.

The High DPI mode stuff is new, though, and far more important than TRIM. Resolution independence has been sort of half-baked into OS X since Tiger. Looks like Apple is ditching the concept and just going with the easier path of pixel doubling. Acceptable compromise, IMO.
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Don't underestimate the imortance of Trim support. It would be really stupid not to included it in Lion.
 
Harry1969 said:
Don't underestimate the imortance of Trim support. It would be really stupid not to included it in Lion.
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I’m not underestimating its importance, it’s just not the end of the world if it’s not included… as current Mac SSD users prove.

But my main point here isn’t to argue the necessity of TRIM, it’s to point out that the supposed evidence for TRIM’s inclusion in Lion isn’t actually evidence at all. TRIM might wind up being added to Lion, but the System Profiler screenshots being used as proof are meaningless.
 
Omg higher res high dpi is exactly what I want. Please make high res's screens for mbps. Reading on an iphone4 is wonderful because of the ppi, and if that experience was also on their mbp line... that would be amazing.
 
Harry1969 said:
Don't underestimate the imortance of Trim support. It would be really stupid not to included it in Lion.
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TRIM is an entirely overrated feature. The only reason it has received so much media attention is because up until now it was a feature notably absent from Mac OS, BSD, and most Linux distros; that is, Windows fanboy fodder that has very little, if any, real-world performance gains.

(Yes, I run a TRIM-supported SSD on Windows 7. No, it has almost zero real-world gains.)
 
InorganicMatter said:
TRIM is an entirely overrated feature. The only reason it has received so much media attention is because up until now it was a feature notably absent from Mac OS, BSD, and most Linux distros; that is, Windows fanboy fodder that has very little, if any, real-world performance gains.

(Yes, I run a TRIM-supported SSD on Windows 7. No, it has almost zero real-world gains.)
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Run that SSD with heavy usage for a couple months and you will definitely notice a difference in speed between when you bought it and the present, if you aren't using TRIM.

It's not hype at all and it is a very valuable function if you want performance.

I'm glad the OS X 10.7 is adding this and hopefully other Unix distros will add it soon.

This isn't windows fanboyism, TRIM has real world gains and improvements that will help extend the life and performance of any SSD that supports it.
 
Question for you TRIM believers out there:
If I'm running 10.6 with a SandForce SSD with decent garbage collection, how much of a change will 10.7's TRIM bring to performance? And will upgrading to Lion reverse any slowness that my SSD will have accumulated from TRIM-less Snow Leopard?
 
milimetersquared said:
Question for you TRIM believers out there:
If I'm running 10.6 with a SandForce SSD with decent garbage collection, how much of a change will 10.7's TRIM bring to performance? And will upgrading to Lion reverse any slowness that my SSD will have accumulated from TRIM-less Snow Leopard?
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It will only reverse it if you do a full format as far as I'm aware, though any files overwritten after it is enabled will be deleted from the SSD entirely, helping the performance.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how well garbage collection compares to TRIM, but if you have any reviews or comparison charts, I'd really like to see them.

EDIT: Also, aggressive garbage collection I've found out severely decreases the life of a SSD due to the increased reads/writes that TRIM does not do.
 
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A Sandforce controller handles TRIM automagically, but the SSDs Apple provides for those that purchase their machines with such drives don't support it, hence the OS has to provide it or the end user needs to get another SSD that does.

But with 10.7, that will finally be addressed, and not require the end user to actually do that. Of course, if you bought a Mac with a hard drive, getting a nice Sandforce-based SSD would be fantastic at this point since 10.7 is still months away from release - months where a current non-Sandforce based drive running under 10.6 is simply going to suffer the consequences until 10.7 is out.

The object of TRIM and Sandforce-based SSDs isn't to improve performance, which is where most folks get lost in all this discussion - the object is to keep performance from suffering which is exactly what will happen when TRIM and Sandforce-based controllers are not part of the storage equation. Garbage collection is somewhat useful but it doesn't quite do the full task like actual TRIM operations do (which is of course hardware based on Sandforce controlled SSDs).

An important distinction there...
 
Not having TRIM won't likely kill the performance of a SSD, but it will definitely decrease over time. People did make due before Win7 though as SSDs have been in existence since the 1970's and been in the mainstream/desktop (affordable) market since 2007/2008.

However, I do have to address one thing, Apple and Microsoft fanboys are both guilty of this:

Any time an OS, be it either or, has a new or useful feature that the other does not have, the other OS party always complains about it not being necessary or bloated or worthless or etc. However, as soon as said OS gets that feature, it's the best thing since sliced bread and those who complained about not having it suddenly just happen to forget about all of the hateful comments made before.

I'm not saying anyone in this thread or this forum is like this, but it is definitely something I would like to point out.

TRIM is useful and all Apple users should be happy that 10.7 will be featuring it as it does have major benefits to those who use SSDs. I'm not sure why there is such a hate towards it as it can do nothing but help. If the user has a HDD and can't utilize it, then that's still great as it is still a part of the new OS X and can be used later if the user wants to do a future upgrade.

Fanbois = :rolleyes:

Just my opinion. ;)
 
Just as a side note, for those interested in just what TRIM support can do for performance, yesterday AnandTech published a review of the newest "economy" Intel SSD, the 510 series. Now, while they won't specifically appear in a Mac or MacBook Pro that I know of (I honestly don't know who Apple contracts with for their SSD hardware, but I'm sure someone will mention it at some point), this is just an example of what can happen to performance without TRIM in operation.

Look over the results of the testing on this particular drive and realize it's brand new and just released while the SSDs in Macs and MacBook Pros (factory SSD hardware) are of older generation technology:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/13

The interesting thing to note here is that the read and write performance suffer horrible drops, massive ones, and the "torture" on the drive only lasted 20 minutes with a series of 4KB random writes. While that's truly "torture" and not indicative of normal day to day performance, considering how many sub-4KB files OSX is made up of, like plists, config files, small text files, etc etc, over time it all adds up - or actually, it subtracts from the potential performance of the SSD.

In time, effectively all SSDs will either get TRIM internally by a hardware controller or by OS support, and probably both at the same time watching over the storage device to keep it running smoothly.

This is just meant to show that TRIM makes a huge difference when it's there and working: that drive dropped from ~371MB/s reads and ~267MB/s writes to ~200MB/s reads (that's basically a 54% cut in performance) and ~105MB/s writes (basically a 37.5% cut), and the burst speed dropped from ~356MB/s down to ~210MB/s (a 59% cut). Ouch.

But then he did a TRIM operation and rested, and while it doesn't return it to factory state, it still returned a ton of the performance that was lost showing that TRIM is and can be extremely beneficial to SSD hardware.

Pretty drastic stuff. And again, that's with a brand new drive using the latest tech and hardware Intel produces and it still suffers dramatic loss of performance in a really short period of time - extrapolate the 20 minutes into a few weeks, months, and it would just get worse and worse, never better.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if I paid a premium price for such hardware, and 2-3 months down the road it was performing at upwards of ~50% slower just because of the storage medium - imagine a 7200 rpm hard drive that gradually slowed down over time to 5400 rpm, then maybe 4200 rpm - I'd be pretty pissed about it...
 
Thank you Joe Average for posting that, that's what I've been looking for. :)

millimetersquared, does that answer your question? ;)
 
Dont have to wait for Lion. Latest build shipping with refresh mbps have "trim" support.

Source
 
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