Wondering how you can check the health status of an SSD drive in your Mac? Thanks to a third party app called DriveDX, determining the health of a Mac SSD and other disk drives is easier than ever.
Do you want to how much free space you have on your Mac? Or perhaps how much space a certain app is taking up on your computer? Either way, you can check your Mac’s storage space within a matter of seconds.
The MacBook Air is not really thought of as being expandable or upgradeable, but it turns out that with a little effort and patience, you can replace the SSD on the MacBook Air yourself. Changing the SSD on a MacBook Air can allow you to dramatically increase the storage size of the Mac and can … Read More
If you need to know the disk performance of an external drive, you can easily go about testing the read and write speed of any such drive by using several third party apps. We’ll cover two, the first is aptly named Disk Speed Test, and the second is called Xbench. Either will work to determine … Read More
If you’re wondering who made the SSD (flash storage) drive on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro it’s fairly easy to determine: Pull down the Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”, then click on “More Info” Click “System Report” Look under “Hardware” for the “Serial-ATA” entry and select it Expand the chipset and … Read More
If you have a third party SSD you probably noticed that Mac OS X Lion probably doesn’t support TRIM on the drive. While OS X Lion supports TRIM for all Apple SSD’s, many third party SSD’s are left without trim in OS X 10.7, OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9, and OS X 10.10.
Want to compare hard disk performance or see just how big of a speed difference that SSD upgrade had? Grab the free Disk Speed Test tool from the Mac App Store, it’s a quick and simple way to measure drive performance. The app works by creating large blocks of temporary data that are written to … Read More
If you’ve been waiting for a good deal on an SSD upgrade, don’t miss these Kingston 2.5″ SSD’s from Buy.com. Each drive comes with free shipping and a huge discount after sending in a mail-in rebate, but the offer is only valid until 7/10/2011. Kingston 64GB SSD v100 Series for $59.89 with free shipping from … Read More
The recently released Mac OS X 10.6.8 Software Update has quietly added native TRIM support to Macs equipped with SSD drives. TRIM insures that your SSD drive will be functioning at optimal speed and extends the life of the solid state disk, making this a must-have update for any Mac user using solid state storage. … Read More
If you’ve bought a MacBook Air recently, you may have a faster SSD than a model that was purchased just a few months ago. The difference in read and write speed is noticeable, the above chart shows the ‘old’ Toshiba TS128C drive atop a ‘new’ SM128C drive, which Anandtech assumes is produced by Samsung, saying: … Read More
It was recently discovered that Mac OS X Lion will have SSD TRIM support, but OS X users with SSD devices may not have to wait until 10.7 is released this summer to get TRIM support. AppleInsider has discovered that newly released MacBook Pro 2011 updates are shipping with a unique build of Mac OS … Read More
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will support the TRIM function for SSD’s, this should significantly boost the lifespan and performance of SSD drives. Hints for support were first discovered last year by Anandtech, but now HardMac has confirmed that support is included in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Preview. TRIM is important because it … Read More
If you’ve been itching to get a solid state drive for your MacBook Pro, here’s a couple good deals from Buy.com on two such drives. The first is a Kingston 128GB SSD for $125, and the other is an OCZ 80GB SSD for $130, both are 2.5″ so they’ll fit into any MacBook or MacBook … Read More
How does an SSD stand up against a stock MacBook Pro hard drive? Watch the video and it speaks for itself. 48 applications are launched simultaneously, with the SSD all the apps launch in an amazing 18 seconds. The stock spinning drive? A laggard 198 seconds to launch the exact same app. This video shows … Read More
If you have an SSD on your Mac, listen up. You can replicate TRIM SSD functionality in Mac OS X by using this great tip from one of our readers, here’s Curt explaining: “I just got a MacBook Air and like many others I was surprised to learn Mac OS X doesn’t support TRIM. I … Read More
I find myself never using the MacBook Pro’s optical drive, the only time I have used it was to boot Mac OS from a DVD to reformat and reinstall Mac OS X. Now that it’s so easy to install Mac OS using an external drive though, is having a DVD drive really a good usage … Read More
Changing the location of your home directory is pretty easy in Mac OS X, and it can be desired for a variety of situations to store a home folder elsewhere on a Mac, or even on another drive. This is valid and works the same in all versions of OS X.
