Optimize your SSD on Apple OS X

May 19, 2011

Tutorials

Frequent write activity on a solid state drive (SSD) can severely degrade its write speed, and the effect is cumulative with ongoing use. There are certain SSD’s though, like OWC Mercury Extreme, who does not appear to suffer from the internal fragmentation issues common with other SSDs.

It appears that with the upcoming OS X Lion we’ll have TRIM support for Solid State Drives. However, for the time being, there are a few tweaks you should do to maintain the top speed of your costly SSD after you’ve installed it.

The achilles heal of HFS (the Mac OS extended file system) is occasional directory corruption. That of course can still happen with SSD’s. I recommend running a good third party disk utility such as MacKeeper (reviewed HERE), on a regular basis to keep the directory healthy. Don’t let the disk get too full, and do the free space wipe occasionally or leave your computer on overnight sometimes. Leaving the computer idle (not doing anything) gives the gc (garbage collection) function time to work and free up used space on its on.

  • Consider keeping your media library onto an external HD (tutorial HERE)
  • Lock the SSD as booting drive to improve startup: go to System Preferences > Startup Disk highlight the SSD and click the lock to lock it as a booting drive

    system_preferences_ssd

    • Still in System Preferences go to Spotlight and under the Privacy tab exclude the SSD from getting indexed (do this if you don’t use Spotlight)spotlight_preferences
    • Install SMART SLEEP (free) and set it to SLEEP ONLY. If not, when the machine goes into hibernation the entire content on the RAM gets written onto the SSD. Download location for Smart Sleep HEREsmartsleep_preferences
    • Free some disk space following this tutorial
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