SSD Optimise a utility to set some more ssd friendly settings

[bcmalloy]

Bought a new SSD and found various settings around the net to reduce unnecessary writes to in leopard - snow leopard without removing any features.

 

I've compiled them into a utility to save myself time in the future, feel free to use it people, check the readme for all the

details the main change is noatime is disabled to stop time stamping of files when they are only read.

 

Tested on 10.6.4 with a ASAX snow leopard II 64gb SSD all seems good.

 

SSDoptimiser.dmg.zip

[rednous]

Thanx , I'll pass it to a friend of mine with SSD on his MacBook.

[MacKonsti]

Thanks bcmalloy, will try it on my MacBook Pro (late 2007) with an Intel X25-M 80GB, soon.

[Donw35]

ran it on my system, so far so good, no real change good or bad

[BiTRiP]

ran it on my system, so far so good, no real change good or bad

 

Same here.

[Hangten]

Hey, Thanks

 

I will try it on my Vertex LE, Although its a Sandforce 1500 controller. FYI Inner workings of SSD can be completely different such as 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300

 

After a short time had past on OCZ website the Vertex LE had the Mac logo and then I installed OSX.... so far my drive has been running without issue. Flashed the latest firmwear.

[kalel83]

Bought a new SSD and found various settings around the net to reduce unnecessary writes to in leopard - snow leopard without removing any features.

 

I've compiled them into a utility to save myself time in the future, feel free to use it people, check the readme for all the

details the main change is noatime is disabled to stop time stamping of files when they are only read.

 

Tested on 10.6.4 with a ASAX snow leopard II 64gb SSD all seems good.

 

SSDoptimiser.dmg.zip

 

what exactly did you put in there?

[BiTRiP]

what exactly did you put in there?

 

Did you check the readme?

[kalel83]

SSD Optimise Changes these switches to optimise Snow Leopard for SSD and

Removes noatime which timestamps files when they are read to save ssd writes. Journaling is left intact and is too useful to disable.

 

This what this app does, basically a compiled list of settings probably better for SSD, I made it for myself but feel free to use it, Not really interested in any feedback….

 

Turn off sudden motion HDD sensor command

sudo pmset -a sms 0

 

Turn off jornaling

 

Turn off hard drive sleep in energy saver

 

Disable waking up when LID opens

sudo pmset lidwake 0

 

No hibernate

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

 

Disabling Sudden Motion Sensor

sudo pmset -a sms 0

 

Verify applied tweaks

pmset -g

 

noatime settings for both 10.5 and 10.6. changed to stop time stamping when files are read.

[scrax]

working here...

just a note for who want to try it: It will automatically restart without confirmations

 

thanks

[danielkza]

I liked most of the tweaks, but there is one I can't really agree with: journaling is not about performance, but about reliability and failure tolerance. I never want to go back to the Win98 days where a shutdown was guaranteed to corrupt the filesystem (the unjournaled FAT32).

[scrax]

I liked most of the tweaks, but there is one I can't really agree with: journaling is not about performance, but about reliability and failure tolerance. I never want to go back to the Win98 days where a shutdown was guaranteed to corrupt the filesystem (the unjournaled FAT32).

journalig is still active for me after using this app

[danielkza]

journalig is still active for me after using this app

I had skimmed through the readme and found 'Turn off jornaling', but I missed the 'Journaling is left intact and is too useful to disable.' part in the first paragraph. Just forget I said anything

[bcmalloy]

All the The setting the utility makes are "safe" ie: jornaling is left on, please note it reboots without warning because once the settings have been Made the system must be rebooted immediately due to the changes made and As I said I made it for myself so why would I bother to make an are you sure yes no prompt

 

Yeah should work fine on a real mac, and it will work with any SSD too.

[cparm]

topic pinned !!

[bigwiger]

I used my SSDs (RAID 0) for the OS and applications only, but have a traditional hard drive for storage. Will these changes affect that hard drive as well, or just my SSDs?

[flames]

really goot question bigwiger asked. and here is another: will normal harddiskdrives benefit of this settings or are the settings event not available for hdds? thx

[kocoman]

So what happens when the ssd wears out?

 

Today the new MacBook air was released with ssd only, but Apple has not addressed the wear problem

 

also, does the ssd wear out faster disk space is always low, but this system is not swapping?

[sefsesas]

Its working,thanks for share

[Martoni]

My system disk is an SSD, but I have a normal hdd too.

That will affect only the disk system right ?

[ThAnEb]

My system disk is an SSD, but I have a normal hdd too.

That will affect only the disk system right ?

 

I've just finished to read script, "it modifies the same file that System Preferences", I mean ssd and hdd.

Here's the details :

 

rm /etc/rc.local /dev/null 2>&1 &

# create a clean up loop during the script execution

 

pmset -a sms 0

# -a flags determines settings for all battery states (Charger/UPS/ALL)

# sms - use Sudden Motion Sensor to park disk heads on sudden changes in G force (value = 0/1)

# 0 minutes to set the idle time to never

 

pmset lidwake 0

# lidwake - wake the machine when the laptop lid (or clamshell) is opened (value = 0/1)

 

pmset -a hibernatemode 0

# hibernatemode - change hibernation mode. Please use caution. (value = integer)

 

pmset -a sms 0

# maybe if a drive was waked up by previous command, I only presume

 

cp /Volumes/SSDoptimise/com.noatime.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.noatime.plist

# install a daemon that will allow files systems to be changed from read-only to read-write or vice versa

 

mount -vuwo noatime /

# -v - verbose mode

# -uw - The -u flag indicates that the status of an already mounted file system should be changed. The -w flag saves this setting.

# -o noatime - Do not update the file access time when reading from a file. This option is useful on file systems where there are large numbers of files and performance is more critical than updating the file access time (which is rarely ever important).

# / - target the root file system

 

love man page

[MacKonsti]

Thanks ThAnEb for explaining more, is the SMS working/enabled in a desktop machine? I mean, I have placed an Intel SSD in both my (original) MacBook Pro and my hackintosh (set as MacPro3,1). Wonder if the sudden motion sensor is active in both cases...

[ThAnEb]

I'm pretty sure the sudden motion sensor is always active (doesn't mean supported or really used by all drives) in OS X computers, have a look to the man pmset, you will see all things it manages, half of them are avalaible on "desktop".

[TOS 1.04]

Nice scripts...

 

I got an intel X25-M 120GB SSD a few days ago, works great out of the box but i've been looking through the various possible tweaks, and watching how frequently OS X makes writes with istat (very frequently :s)

 

One other tweak that i haven't seen mentioned here is ram disks... this can also be an improvement on regular HDDs for responsiveness... but for SSDs the advantage is less writes and longer life.

 

The idea is to link certain directories to ram disks on start up... i.e. "/var/tmp" which are frequently written to by the system.

 

That directory is ok to loose of course so you dont have to worry about writing it back (because obviously the ram disk is volotile). But if you want to try other files/directories that are frequently written and aught to be kept (i.e. logs) then they may need to be written back to disk on sleep or shutdown... another benefit might be application user caches, i.e safari... which shows lots of disk io while browsing but doesn't really take up much space.

 

Of course this all depends on how much ram you have to burn... if you don't have much then the ram disk get's paged out but that really shouldn't happen in anything but the most of extreme circumstances since os x should keep things that are in use in real memory... even if it is paged out then it will still cause beneficially less io operations while in use.

 

The process of making a ram disk is quite simple... the tricky part is what point to invoke it in the startup script so things don't get F'ed up.

 

[edit]

 

here's the link for designating ram disks for specific directories:

 

http://blogs.nullvision.com/?p=357

 

Getting used to this new near silent operation (installed my SSD in a unibody MBP) start to hear all sorts of really quiet IC sounds that i would have never heard before (yes the chips actually make sounds !) if i put my ear close to the left side of the logic board the sata controller sounds like a really quiet HDD actuator... but more like noise than clicks... although you can only barely hear it during high IO operations.

[Breathless]

Just tried this on Lion. Seems to work ok...