My first SSD - 10.9.2 - Questions over questions!

[ommi]

Hi everyone!

I recently purchased my very first solid state drive, and I am a little scared to use it straight away, because I really want to make sure to make no mistakes, and get it to last as long as possible. Personally, I value the SSD's lifespan over its performance. And that is also why I want to be sure on everything.
That said, here are some of the things haunting me right now:

• I purchased a SanDisk Extreme 120GB (SanDisk SDSSDX120GG25 Media), which is said to have a SandForce Controller, and therefore does NOT require TRIM to be enabled. On a SanDisk forum however, someone said the following:

TRIM will not have any ill affects on the SSD. TRIM and garbage collection essentially do the same thing. Both Erase unused blocks so they can be written to without the need to Erase it first. The difference between TRIM and garbage collection is that TRIM commands are sent by the host OS in real time where garbage collection is initiated by the SSD controller when there is no activity on the SSD. Both will work together to ensure the SSD maintains performance over the life of the SSD.

forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk-Extreme-SSD/To-TRIM-or-not-to-TRIM-on-OSX/m-p/291715/highlight/true#M1331

So now what??? Does anyone know what is actually best to prolongue the life of the SSD?

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• Should I do a fresh installation or can I also use SuperDuper! to simply clone my "old" System onto the SSD? Are there advantages in doing the fresh install, maybe on the SSD-specific MultiBeast post-installation part?

• My console used to be flooded with SMC error messages. And even though that magically stopped, there are by far more things popping up in there than e.g. on my Macbook Pro running 10.9.2. so I am afraid of that somehow leading to loads of unnessecary writes on the SSD (e.g. in the Console Log-File?). Could constant flooding in the Console mean harm to the SSD?

• Does it make any difference concerning the lifespan whether I use the SSD with a SATA2 or a SATA3 port?

• Are there any other do's & dont's, tricks, tweaks or unwritten laws on how to treat the SSD right and make it last as long as possible?

I thank everyone who considers a reply on this matter, as I wasn't able to find anything respectively using the search.

Thank you very very much,

ommi

 

[Koalaman]

I can't speak for the trim issues, but I would defiantly recommend a fresh install. Also, the best way to ensure a SSD's lifespan is to limit the writes to it.


P.S. why would you even think about running a SATA 3 SSD on SATA 2? That's like buying a race car to go 30Mph!