Intel SSD in MacBook Pro

Question

Hi everyone,
I have a Macbook Pro 15, mid-2009. I put a SSD in it. However, it's getting slow gradually. My question is how to restore the Intel SSD performance like brand-new. Please as specific as possible, thank you.

Answer 1

How long have you had the drive?
How hard do you use it?
How do you know its slower – through everyday usage or through benchmark tests?
This is the issue with SSDs - they slow down over time. Its the way they store and then remove data. Basically, when you delete something, its marked as deleted but not actually removed from the disk. Hence, next time you write data to them particular memory blocks, it needs to wipe the old data and replace it with the new, which takes a little more time.
There is a feature called TRIM, which basically runs when the drive is idle, and sets about 'cleaning up' the disk so that its ready to be written on, and hence faster.
However, firstly your SSD must support TRIM, and your OS must also support TRIM. Currently the only OS that supports TRIM is Windows 7, unfortunately. It seems that with the recent 10.4.6 update, TRIM support is being added to Snow Leopard as it is listed in the system properties, but its not actually 'switched on' yet. Maybe Apple haven’t quite got the full functionality going yet......
SSDs come with an ‘Indilinx’ controller built into them. This is a slightly older controller, which needs TRIM since, as you’ve noticed, the drive tends to slow down over time.
However, newer, and more expensive SSDs, are being released with a new ‘SandForce’ controller. There is secrecy around how this controller works, but its reported to do the TRIM feature on-the-fly – so it doesn’t suffer from slow down issues. I have a Vertex 2 SSD, which has the SandForce controller, and although I haven’t had it very long, its as fast as when I first installed it, and it should stay very close to this speed, as other people who have SandForce drives have noticed with their benchmarks.
The only way to speed up you drive to how it was when new, at the moment, is to use a tool to perform a clean reformat (a normal format wont do). You’ll need to search Google for a tool that does this with SSDs as I haven’t looked into any. The downside is that you obviously need to reinstall everything from scratch afterwards – hence it comes down to whether you can be bother to go through the procedure. Your SSD should still be much faster then a HDD even in its ‘slow state’.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2458214