Recovering my better half’s system drive. Her OWC 480GB SSD was allowed to reach 100% capacity (only 1.5GB remain)… And all hell broke loose. It’s barely readable (takes 10 minutes just to mount on my laptop), and I can’t even delete anything (any attempt to modify the filesystem just returns an invalid argument).
I’m currently rsync-ing all the things to a network volume, and will attempt to deal with this after the data is safe.
That machine was long overdue for a refresh anyway.
Lessons *:
- When setting up an SSD, make sure to enable TRIM. Windows | macOS (≥10.10.4).
- OWC seems to discourage the use of TRIM, citing “garbage collection”. I believe those are different things, but more research is needed.
- Leave unpartitioned space on the SSD. The accepted guideline seems to be ≈10% of total capacity
* Disclaimer: I take no responsibility whatsoever for any effects, including but not limited to loss of data, caused directly or indirectly by this blog post.