Yosemite kills third-party SSD support

Yosemite kills third-party SSD support

Summary: If you are running a Mac that uses a third-party SSD with TRIM enabled, then upgrading to OS X 10.10 Yosemite will leave you in a world of hurt as Apple drops support for third-party SSDs.

SHARE:

Apple has, without warning, removed support for third-party SSDs in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, leaving anyone who uses one as a boot drive and has TRIM enabled with a Mac that won't boot.

While this is unlikely to be a problem for the average Mac user, for high-end Mac users such as filmmakers and videographers running customized systems it's a serious problem.

According to Cindori Software, makers of the popular utility Trim Enabler, the issue is down to a newly introduced security feature called kext signing. A kext is an OS X kernel extension, or a driver.

Enabling TRIM is one of the best ways to maximize the life of a solid-state drive, but OS X doesn't support it out-of-the-box except for Apple's own drives, but until now it has been possible to enable it by altering drivers, although that has never been officially sanctioned by Apple. 

"Kext signing basically works by checking if all the drivers in the system are unaltered by a third party, or approved by Apple," wrote Cindori Software on its blog. "If they have been modified, Yosemite will no longer load the driver. This is a means of enforcing security, but also a way for Apple to control what hardware that third-party developers can release OS X support for."

The Trim Enabler software has been updated so that it can disable kext signing, but this is a global setting, and disables an otherwise useful security feature. However, if you rely on third-party SSDs, it's your only hope.

"It is important to note that disabling the kext-signing to enable Trim is best described as taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and for most users it will not be worth it," writes Cindori Software. "But I have been unsuccessful in creating a less invasive method to enable Trim, as all of Apple’s AHCI SATA drivers are closed source and undocumented, which makes it impossible for me to create my own Trim driver and get it signed. This is the only alternative for enabling Trim for the moment."

The blog post also outlines how users locked out of their Macs following an upgrade can get back into their systems.

"I have to say I’m extremely disappointed by Apple with this," writes Andrew Reid on the DSLR filmmaker site EOSHD. "To have an official installation of OS-X simply stop working when upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite is unacceptable for any user. For professional environments and pro video it is even more troublesome and it puts vital data and creative projects at risk. Is this what Apple wants to be known for? At the very least the installation should detect if an appropriate SSD is present before attempting to install and notify the user if there’s a problem. I just had a grey screen and a dead system."

Some SSD drives, such as those supplied by OWC, do not require TRIM to be enabled because they have the feature built into the drive, and are as such unaffected.

The big takeaway here is that if you are running a third-party SSD as a boot drive, and you do have TRIM enabled, then you need to take steps before upgrading to Yosemite to make sure that your drive will continue to be accessible after the upgrade.

See also:

Topics: Hardware, Apple, Operating Systems

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Talkback

109 comments
Log in or register to join the discussion
  • No thanks

    Apple has become the company they used to rally against.


    Sorry mac users, you are most certainly third class citizens in Apples view.
    Emacho
    • Why anyone supports this company is beyond me

      Their stuff really isn't all that good -- reality distortion field notwithstanding -- and they pull crap like this all the time. Any company who thinks they know better than me what I want won't be getting my business.
      x I'm tc
      • To be fair

        To be fair, all OEMs pull stuff almost as bad as this.
        Sacr
        • to be fair????

          Pretty much any OEM laptop or desktop I have worked with has been able to switch to an SSD and have the OS be re-installed and working. This is yet another example of Apple making you by their or their vendors stuff and paying through the nose for it. Typical, yeah it's a great experience excuse, for paying too much for last years hardware. Loses me every time.
          E Fries
          • Sigh!

            In reality, it's what amounts to an undocumented driver that is the fault. SSD's won't prevent the computer from working, as the article makes clear. But this driver, as a third party kext, isn't done with the approval of Apple. I wonder if they even contacted Apple to see if something could be worked out.

            When you consider that practically every update that MS has issued for the last several years has resulted in damage to the system, and needed to be withdrawn, at times causing major damage, and at other times preventing the computer from working at all, this is a very minor situation.

            People who are using their machines for professional purposes have been warned, in the past, to not use this kext, but they insisting in doing so. The fault it theirs therefor.
            melgross
          • re:

            "When you consider that practically every update that MS has issued for the last several years has resulted in damage to the system, and needed to be withdrawn, at times causing major damage, and at other times preventing the computer from working at all, this is a very minor situation."

            What complete BS. MS bends over backwards to make sure its stuff work on a universe of hardware old and new. You're just trying to make it seem like what Apple has done here isn't as bad as it is.
            Sir Name
          • Say What?

            "What complete BS. MS bends over backwards to make sure its stuff work on a universe of hardware old and new."

            BWAHAHAHAHA!!! In what universe do you live in? My tagline used to read: "Look Out! Another Microsoft Patch!" And about 7 out of 10 updates usually screwed up my system in one way or another, resulting in me having to troubleshoot and make changes to the system to make it work with the new patches. And I'm not alone, a lot of their updates wreaked havoc on hundreds of thousands of computers all over the world.
            Yes, Apple sucks, but MS sucks too......
            Tinman57
          • Untrue.

            @Sir Name

            Going from, I think NT 4 to XP Pro, MS dropped support for booting from software mirrored disks. And this was their own software mirrored disks. Not some third party feature. No warning whatsoever. Installed the new version and never booted again.
            Henry 3 Dogg
          • OK,

            Sir Name, please explain why Microsoft has had to run patches out of cycle to correct issues caused by patches issued in the past several Patch Tuesdays. There are numerous articles here on ZDNet and other tech pubs out there to back up my claim. I'm waiting for your answer.... (I'll get popcorn as the answer you come up with will be highly entertaining seeing how you are always rushing to the defense of Microsoft)
            benched42
          • Wow, FUD much?

            "When you consider that practically every update that MS has issued for the last several years has resulted in damage to the system, and needed to be withdrawn, at times causing major damage, and at other times preventing the computer from working at all, this is a very minor situation."

            Microsoft is the most transparent OS vendor with regards to their updates (Linux would be more so depending on what support vendor you are using) and MS breaks down their updates more granularly to allow more control over what you are updating and not. They also allow enterprises to run servers like WSUS to pic and choose what updates install, how they install, what prompts to give, when, etc.

            Most of the problems you have seen of late with MS updates have been with a very very small minority of PCs and the problems have been mostly with 3rd party apps doing things they should not be doing causing problems (that one with the fonts comes to mind). MS has to deal with literally millions of various possible hardware configurations with each patch and support OSs going back to Vista and everything in between. Its amazing all of this works as well as it does.
            Rann Xeroxx
          • Yes. To be fair.

            This is completely the fault of the suppliers of Trim Enabler.

            And had they checked out their software and assumptions during the Yosemite Beta Period, they could have warned their customers and better yet, provided a solution.

            I'm writing this on a Mac running Yosemite, booted of a Fusion drive built using a 3rd party SSD.

            Works just fine.

            Glad I didn't waste my time on Trim Enabler.
            Henry 3 Dogg
      • whatever

        While this is a stupid thing for Apple to have done, their stuff is "really IS all that good". Their software engineers are top notch as is their design (HW engineering as well as industrial design). I've been using their stuff for a long time, as well as stuff from many other major brands, and I'll take Apple for quality software above the rest any time. As a software developer who has developer on Apple platforms for a long time, as well as other platforms including mini computers, unix servers, and others, the Apple software system is top notch.
        chadpengar
        • My condolences

          Sorry that you have fallen victim to the reality distortion field. Apple stuff really isn't that good. Until recently the phrase "it just works" is true, but the fact was and still is that there aren't many things Apple products can do. All their OSes are always several years behind their other competitors on features (like the last iOS update - all my friends were all "I can do this now!", and I said "yeah, I've been doing that for 2 years now"). It may "just work", but it doesn't do hardly anything in the first place. Even sadder for Apple is that lately their stuff doesn't "just work" either, and are plagued with design problems and security vulnerabilities out the wazoo. The only people who buy Apple products anymore are the ones who will buy them even if they suck, just for the brand name. There is no actual objective justification to buy an Apple product anymore.
          AnomalyTea
          • Uh huh

            And simply not buying one isn't good enough for you, which is why you troll sensationalist blog posts like this one. Insecure much?
            monoclast@...
          • How about some concrete examples?

            "... but the fact was and still is that there aren't many things Apple products can do"

            I'm very firmly in the MS camp for my PCs and Android for my phone and tablet, but your blanket statement is meaningless without some examples. What are some things that Apple products can't do that Microsoft products can?

            If their OSs are always several years behind then perhaps you can mention an example or two of specific examples where OS X trails Windows?

            I can confirm that "it just works" has been false for quite a few years. My brother has tried that line on me and then I remind him how many times his Apple guru friend had to fix his Mac, how TimeMachine stopped working, how both the OS and applications became irretrievably broken.

            I've never lost data on any of my Windows PCs unless I deleted it by mistake. Partially it's because I'm an IT professional and I've been doing backups for years, but partially because, historically, Windows software wasn't written for (morons) by hiding all of the technical bits under an interface that they hoped would be so intelligent that user's didn't need to know the nitty-gritty details. My to my great disappointment, however, Windows has been moving in that direction ever since Vista. As an example I'll point you to the idiot-ification of the Control Panel, how the default view hid most of the controls in favor of a "what do you want to do" interface. Sounds good except the wizards didn't give easy access to settings that you needed to change sometimes. But at least there was the "classic view" option which I'm sure most readers of ZDNet chose to use.
            ken@...
          • well off the top...

            Instant hotspot comes to mind off the top of my head as one way in which Apple trailed Microsoft. Windows PCs have been able to turn on Windows phone hotspots remotely for over a year now, long before Apple copied the feature and started trying to market it as a big deal.

            There's also multitasking in ios and the default ios keyboard to consider. Former is absent, latter would be better off absent.

            That's not to say they don't do certain things well, just that they don't seem to do terribly well on the software end.

            Which doesn't do a thing to stop their marketing juggernaut, but that's a different topic.
            dricht1
          • No. No and No

            @drichri
            Apple haven't been making a big deal of remotely tuning on instant hotspots. In fact it's a rather serious security flaw to be able to do so.

            Apple has been making a big deal of the iOS 8 / Yosemite continuity features which Windows and Android users have been claiming that they've had for years. But they haven't had them for years. They haven't got them at all. The claim is just Bullshit. Which is why Samsung have been rushing to get their own set of similar features out.

            iOS multitasking isn't absent. iOS is built on Unix and has been a fully multitasking OS since the initial version in 2007. It would be rather hard to remove the multitasking from Unix and have it still work at all. Perhaps you are confused about what multitasking means in an OS context.

            The iOS default keyboard is a default keyboard. From your general lack of knowledge, I guess you've never tried it. but hey, if you don't like it, use another one.

            Your general "...don't seem to do terribly well on the software end" is so unspecific that I guess it just covers a lack of knowledge of what software they may have.
            Henry 3 Dogg
          • Window is, and always was, a joke.

            I use a Mac and Windows about equally often. I program for both.

            For the naive user, the Mac FAR more often just works than any PC.

            You may have never lost data on a PC because, as an IT Pro, you do proper backups. Great.

            But remember that historically backups on PCs have been so badly supported that many IT Pros would shut the machine down and boot from another disk (probably Linux) in order to ensure that they had a valid backup of the boot disk.

            Bluntly the average naive user's chance of backing up and recovering from a major system failure on a PC is minimal. Time Machine meets this requirement far better.

            "Windows software wasn't written for (morons) by hiding all of the technical bits under an interface..."

            Yes it was. It's called the registry. Now what was that registry setting that gets renamed every version and I have to set it to get Kerberos to work...

            Windows is SO badly designed that when you uninstall things the OS expects the user to make decisions about whether libraries are likely to be in use by anything else. Come on. Get real.

            The objective of every OS has always been to avoid the users needing to know the Nitty Gritty features. Otherwise we would all load a boot loader using front panel switches. That was always the objective, but MS were just bad at it.

            How many years were all the important buttons on the Display Control Panel, off the bottom of the screen on the default VGA driver used while swapping display drivers. Users can just be expected to know that they need to tab seven times and then hit return.
            Henry 3 Dogg
          • Depends...

            Windows and Mac OS are about as good and bad with regards to recovery. Running a Windows 8.1u2 machine as Standard User is about the equivalent with regards to stability and safety of data as Mac Yosemite.

            I do like how Mac OS installs many apps as self contained compressed files, kudos for this model. You can write sloppy Mac OS apps that disregard Apple's programing best practices just like you can for Windows OS. I work in configuration management for clients and we see bad installers on both as we have to take apart these installers to process them correctly for deployment with our CM tools. Things like using the same SID for updates to existing program installers, just plan sloppy.
            Rann Xeroxx
        • Stupid move?

          The only thing Apple did was require third-party kernel drivers to be signed with a certificate of authenticity. Calling this a "stupid move" is silly, especially considering the driver in question isn't needed, since modern SSDs now-a-days have better built-in garbage collection and so on than TRIM offers. The fact is there is absolutely nothing special Mac users need to do to use SSDs. Plug it in, and it "just works".
          monoclast@...