That article is talking about performance under conditions where you're writing a very large amount of data to the drive very quickly and often, which can occur in enterprise-level situations, such as a server. In those conditions, of course you need a large spare area, since both TRIM and idle-time garbage collection take time to clear up free space, and if you're putting constant stress on the drive such that you outrun them, you could use up the spare area, increase write amplification, and hurt performance. I'm not saying more spare area is a bad thing. I just don't think it's a panacea that can completely replace TRIM, which is a much more thorough solution to the problem (if you read the article I linked, it claims that lowering the spare area on a SandForce drive will not result in a noticeable drop in performance — under ordinary conditions, of course). I'm also not saying that SandForce drives aren't the best solution for Mac users at the moment — they certainly are, since OS X doesn't support TRIM yet. Once it does, however, I suspect that all this "TRIM is bad" talk that you tend to hear on Mac message boards and nowhere else will disappear before too long.
All I know is my Intel drive dies within a couple of months, and my SandForce based drive is just as quick today as the day I installed it. Theoretical discussions and synthetic benchmarks are interesting, but what is more useful to me is today the drive works just fine and today TRIM is totally unnecessary.
DocNoc42, thanks for the very informative post. So I gather I should go for a Sandforce based SSD for my 2009 13" MBP. right? The cheapest 64GB I could find on Amazon is Adata S599 for $120 or so. Will you recommend this SSD or do you think I must go for some other brand? Will appreciate your reply.
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Huh? How about this for a quote:
Extra capacity (or spare area as Anand calls it) most definitely makes a difference.
Source Article
All I know is my Intel drive dies within a couple of months, and my SandForce based drive is just as quick today as the day I installed it. Theoretical discussions and synthetic benchmarks are interesting, but what is more useful to me is today the drive works just fine and today TRIM is totally unnecessary.
DocNoc42, thanks for the very informative post. So I gather I should go for a Sandforce based SSD for my 2009 13" MBP. right? The cheapest 64GB I could find on Amazon is Adata S599 for $120 or so. Will you recommend this SSD or do you think I must go for some other brand? Will appreciate your reply.