Comments on: Recondition an SSD on the Mac… for free!

By: Anton

Anton — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:07:28 +0000

Ha! That was a clever move I placed everything related to Torrent on 2nd HDD rather than SSD. Like why would I ever need all that drive speed for just downloads? The only thing I’m worried about is Photoshop scratch files with can grow unto 60GB in minutes. Do you think Mac Os X Lion’s available Trim feature would avoid that problem?

By: Derek Stutsman

Derek Stutsman — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:34:31 +0000

These techniques didn’t work for me, but I found something that did:

- boot from Snow Leopard disk, run disk utility
- back up the drive to a disk image on an external drive
- boot off an ubuntu 10.4 cd and install it
- download hdparm and run the included wiper.sh script
- boot from Snow Leopard and run disk utility again
- restore the backup image to the drive

Pain, but it worked flawlessly. My performance is again like new.!

By: Milan Dandukovic

Milan Dandukovic — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:39:12 +0000

Hello,

thanks for your quick reply!

I am not sure if writing 0 on the entire SSD does actually improve performance (actually I believe it degrades it). You can write 0′s on the SSD using Disk Utility, but in my case I found out, that it didn’t improve any speeds.
However after erasing my SSD with “Erase Free Space” button, I did find my speeds improving a little. I have a Samsung SSD 220MB Read / 200MB Write speed. The problem is, I do not know how fast the SSD actually was after I had bought it, but right now its on 200MB Read / 150MB Write, which I find to be OK.

Lastly, here is a link to fragmentation image of my SSD after erasing free space (before it was fragmented as hell – note that I did not defrag my SSD, I only erased it and then erased free space on it):

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/4741/bildschirmfoto20100718u.png

Hope it helps!

By: JasonTomczak

JasonTomczak — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:44:28 +0000

Thanks for the info, Milan! If Erase Free Space really does the same thing for SSD health, then all the other partition/dmg steps can just be ignored. Of course, writing zeros to a 128GB drive is way, way slower than making a drive-sized disk image, but it reduces the whole project down to three major steps:

– clone master drive using CCC
– boot from external/cloned drive
– open Disk Utility.app, select master drive and Erase Free Space (write zeros once)
– get a good night’s sleep while zeros are written
– insert Snow Leopard DVD and reboot the computer to the DVD (and unplug your external cloned drive for data safety)
– install Snow Leopard and import files and applications from the external clone.

Hopefully that works just as well for other folks out there.

By: Milan Dandukovic

Milan Dandukovic — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:20:35 +0000

Hey,

FINALLY someone posts a decent article on how to recondition an SSD on a mac. I’ve searched for months to find something like this… all in vain until now.

However:
You said that “Erase Free Space” function seemed unimportant, as you created as image File the size of the SSD. The “Erase Free Space” function does this as well. It fills the SSD, then deletes the file.
I erased the SSD, then used “Erase free space”, installed fresh OS and found out, that SSD fragmentation was basically gone (using TechTool Pro, the free space was in one big chunk – before the “Erasing free Space” it was fragmented as hell).

Does this mean, that if I basically just partition the SSD and then use “Erase Free Space” on it, I recondition my SSD?