Came across a pretty cool howto to tweak your SSD on a Mac. Only thing I noticed is setting the hibernate mode to 0 made my mac randomly wake up a few seconds after it went to sleep (and happened most often when closing the lid, less often when clicking the sleep button; randomly closing apps seemed to sometimes fix this problem; usually closing Skype and VLC solved this…) Set it the hibernate mode 7 now (which was the default I think)
yeri$ sudo pmset -g | grep hibernatemode hibernatemode 7
yeri$ mount /dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled, noatime) ... /dev/disk2 256Mi 6.0Mi 250Mi 3% /private/tmp
I did indeed, as noted in the above howto/blog post, that shutting down is slower. Not that much, just a bit. As I usually don’t shut down, I guess this isn’t much of a problem. However, this additional mount point creates a disk on my desktop (or in finder), which is annoying.
However, this seems fixable with
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /private/tmp/
But, this option seems forgotten after a reboot and has to be started over. Crappy.
So, tried with AppleScript then, created a new script with following content:
quit application "Finder" tell application "System Events" to ¬ set visible of disk "Volatile HD" to false delay 0.1 launch application "Finder"
And saved it as “File Format: Application” and “Options: Run Only”. The delay line is needed, as without it, finder doesn’t seem to start/reopen its folders/show desktop icons until you click its icon again in the Dock. You can change the delay to 1, but that was a bit slow for me; tried a delay of 0.0001 too, but that gave the same issue as not putting in a delay line in at all.
You can just download the script/application here.
Drag the application to the Application folder, and add a start up item for it (System Preferences -> Accounts -> YOU -> Login Items; click the +-button and browse till you find your application). Should do the trick.
I also changed the ramfs disk size to 128Mb instead of 256Mb, as 256Mb seemed a lot for a disk that was using ~10Mb.
3 replies on “Mac OS X + SSD tweaks”
[…] received a question about creating a RAMFS for Mac OS X’ /tmp folder, so I’ll post my reply here as […]
About:
“/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /private/tmp/”
But, this option seems forgotten after a reboot and has to be started over. Crappy.
–> you can fix that definitvely by changing ramfs.sh by adding “-o nobrowse ” in the mount line:
mount -o noatime -t hfs ${ramdisk_dev} ${mount_point}
becomes:
mount -o noatime -o nobrowse -t hfs ${ramdisk_dev} ${mount_point}
bash-3.2# mount |grep tmp
/dev/disk1 on /private/tmp (hfs, local, noatime, nobrowse)
About the size of RAMFS, you can set 2Gb easily.
Indeed, the RAM won’t be allocated while you don’t fill /private/tmp