Best 3 SSD Tools for MAC to Maintain SSD Drive.

SSD drives are offering high performance in terms of operating speed for your MAC machine. Even though SSD are bit expensive, it can pay back you in terms of speed. It can read, write and load your OS X in lightning speed compare to your traditional spinning hard disk.

But when you consider maintenance and span of life, traditional hard disk does not need any additional maintenance and has more life span. With this current technology, SSDs are demanding more care and bit less life span while offering best speed performance.

There are few tools available in the software market and Apple store to measure the performance of your SSD and monitor its life. Most of these tools are capable to enable Trim function for your laptop.

Trim function is known as an essential feature as part of SSD mainetnace. Every time when you delete a file on your SSD, the data still stays on the drive in segments called blocks. These blocks are not deleted until you need to use them again to write new data.

Due to technical limitations in the NAND Flash design, only whole blocks can be deleted in SSD. This means that when you need to write new data, the SSD must perform time-consuming cleaning and maintenance of these blocks before your data is written.

With Trim feature your blocks can be cleaned instantly when you delete the data, leading to much less operations during the writing process which gives you better speeds and minimizes the wear on the drive.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

Disk Speed Test is an easy tool to use with your MAC that can use to quickly measure and certify your disk. It is easy to start test with simple click. Disk Speed Test will write test data your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result.

Disk Speed Test will continue to test writes and reads from your disk so you can evaluate both performance and readability over time.

Chameleon SSD Optimizer

Chameleon is an optimization tool for Solid State Drive on Mac OS X system. It can enable TRIM on non Apple-branded disks and increase durability by reducing I|O writing cycles, set hibernate mode and save space disabling sleep image.
Chameleon is able to read SATA system profiler info and allows you to easily check trim status, disk speed or properties and also supporting S.M.A.R.t. status.

Chameleon SSD Optimizer can monitor your SSD’s performance and , and make sure it will continue working properly by enabling the trimming function.

DriveDx

DriveDx is an advanced drive health diagnostic and monitoring utility. DriveDx does not only monitor the drive’s built-in S.M.A.R.T. status, but also analyzes the changes of all drive health indicators that are closely related to SSD or HDD failures like SSD wear out / endurance, reallocated bad sectors, offline bad sectors, pending sectors, I/O errors and more.

DriveDx alerts user immediately if anything goes wrong. The application provides access to all sufficient drive diagnostic data. This app supports modern SSDs and HDDs and offer real time SSD/HDD health status monitoring. It can display SSD lifetime left indicator, save drive’s health report to file and monitor drive temperature, drive free space etc.

Trim Enabler

With Trim Enabler, you can bring trim to any Solid State Drive. Trim is must have feature for most SSDs. It not only increases data writing speeds, but it increases the lifetime of the SSD itself.

Trim Enabler can monitor your disks and the detailed S.M.A.R.T monitor will provide performance and health relevant statistics and reports about your disks, both Hard and Solid State Drives. The inbuilt benchmark feature measure SSD or hard drive speeds and file system performance with the super-easy-to-use Benchmark feature.

Xbench

Xbench was developed by Spiny Software to provide a comprehensive benchmarking solution for Mac OS X. Xbench is useful not only for comparing the relative speeds of two different Macintoshes, but also for optimizing performance on a single machine. Xbench is accompanied by a website that allows graphical side-by-side comparison of any out of thousands of submitted benchmarks.

Eventually the SSD technology will improve and offer you more reliable SSDs with less maintenance and reach up to the same life of traditional Hard Disk life span without any additional tools or maintain software. You have to depend on at least one software tool to maintain your SSD until technology reach into that point.