Angelbird Claims First Third-Party Mac SSD With TRIM Support
Angelbird claims to have built the first third-party SSD with TRIM support on Macs.
Installing an SSD in a MacBook isn't the easiest thing to do. That's not because it's difficult to access the hardware, but because natively, Apple has disabled TRIM commands for non-OEM drives. Thus, in order to have TRIM support on your SSD, you need to buy one directly from Apple, which isn't really possible. Alternatively, you can enable these commands with a software trick, but now, there is a new solution.
Angelbird, an Austrian SSD manufacturer, has announced its SSD wrk for Mac, which according to the company is the first and only third-party SSD to natively support TRIM commands on Macs. Beyond that, it's not a bad SSD, either; it comes in capacities ranging from 128 GB through 512 GB, carries a Silicon Motion 2246EN controller, and has MLC NAND flash.
Read speeds will soar as high as 563 MB/s over a SATA3 (6 Gb/s) interface, while write speeds range from 149 MB/s to 450 MB/s, with the higher-capacity SSD performing faster. Angelbird has rated the SSDs with an MTBF of two million hours.
TRIM commands are considered a necessity on SSDs because they ensure that the drive knows which data blocks are unused, allowing the SSD to handle the garbage collection process and thus minimizing performance degradation and increasing the drive's lifetime.
Angelbird priced the SSDs at $99.99 for the 128 GB drive, $159.99 for the 256 GB unit, and $299.99 for the biggest 512 GB SSD.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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Christopher1 How is Apple not getting hit with an anti-competitive practices lawsuit for this? It is the same bullhockey that Microsoft tried back in the day! Time for Apple to get a spanking.Reply -
Fred Maxwell ReplyHow is Apple not getting hit with an anti-competitive practices lawsuit for this?
Because Apple is not required to use hardware features on devices that they do not supply and may not have tested.
Both Intel and Crucial have sold SSDs in which there have been data corruption problems related to TRIM. So if Apple had enabled TRIM by default on those, customers could be looking at corrupted data or even a non-bootable Mac. Apple would be incurring huge support costs, and idiot fanboys would be calling it "TRIMGate" and citing it as an example of how Macs are unreliable and Apple makes crappy products.
Hope that clears it up for you.